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This story is from Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action. Sign up for Floodlight’s newsletter here.
From her home in Donaldsonville, Louisiana, less than 3 miles from the world’s largest ammonia plant, Ashley Gaignard says the air itself carries a chemical edge.
The odor, she said, is sharp and lingering. Years ago, when her son attended an elementary school about a mile from the massive CF Industries ammonia production facility, he would begin wheezing during recess, she recalled. His breathing problems eased only after he transferred to a school several miles farther away.
“I’m not against progress,” Gaignard said. “We are against development that poisons and displaces and disregards human life.”
Now, along Louisiana’s Mississippi River corridor, fertilizer giant CF Industries and other companies are placing multibillion-dollar bets on “blue ammonia” — a product made from fossil fuels but with extra technology to capture planet-warming gases and pipe them underground for storage.
To date, no commercial-scale blue ammonia plants are operating — but more than 20 have been proposed nationwide, according to Oil and Gas Watch. Four of the largest such plants are slated for Louisiana, in communities already saturated with petrochemical pollution.
An extensive review by Floodlight found no evidence that existing carbon capture projects anywhere in the world have achieved anything close to the emissions cuts companies like CF Industries are promising. Permit documents, meanwhile, show that the proposed plants combined could be allowed to discharge more than 2,800 tons each year of air pollutants (not greenhouse gases), including more than 400 tons of ammonia.
Classified as a highly hazardous chemical, ammonia can damage the lungs and hurt the skin, eyes, and throat. In the air, it can form fine particles that are linked to increased risks of heart disease and stroke, and can be deadly — particularly for children, older adults, and people with heart or lung disease.
The Louisiana plants would also be allowed to release carcinogens, including benzene and formaldehyde.
The companies proposing those plants — CF Industries, Air Products, Clean Hydrogen Works, and St. Charles Clean Fuels — have said their operations will provide an abundant source of clean fertilizer and clean energy to global markets, including countries whose climate and trade policies favor low-carbon fuels. They’ve also said they’ll create nearly 840 permanent jobs and millions in new tax revenue for local communities while prioritizing public health and safety.
“We are designing the facility with advanced emissions controls, robust monitoring systems, and strong operational practices to minimize impacts,” said Chandra Stacie, the director of community relations for St. Charles Clean Fuels. “Our goal is to operate responsibly and be a constructive, long-term partner.”
Environmental advocates, scientists, and community members, however, say the new ammonia plants would delay the phaseout of fossil fuels — and bring substantial air pollution and safety risks to places that have long borne the health costs of America’s industrial economy.
While the historic streets of Donaldsonville recently served as the backdrop to the 2025 blockbuster “Sinners,” the town’s real-life drama is far less cinematic.
Donaldsonville lies at the center of Cancer Alley, a chemical corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans known for its elevated health risks and dense concentration of petrochemical plants and refineries.
Now, this stretch of Louisiana is also ground zero for a new build-out: four proposed blue ammonia plants, with several more planned for Texas.
So, why the Gulf Coast?
South Louisiana has abundant natural gas for ammonia production and ports that connect to international shipping routes.
The state offers an existing pipeline network, a seasoned chemical-industry workforce, and political leaders who have consistently favored industrial development. The companies proposing ammonia plants can also tap generous state and federal incentives, including more than $2 billion in federal tax credits for carbon capture projects.
The Inflation Reduction Act, former President Joe Biden’s signature climate law, allows companies to collect up to $85 for each ton of carbon captured and permanently stored.
And the state of Louisiana is offering developers millions more in grants and tax breaks designed to spur economic development.
Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University who has studied carbon capture systems for years, said there’s little to be gained — and much to lose — from making ammonia this way.
“These plants increase air pollution, they increase global warming … they increase not only energy costs but total social costs, and so there’s zero benefit — except to the people who are taking the subsidies to implement these projects,” he said.
The scale of subsidies for the proposed Louisiana ammonia plants is “off-the-charts outrageous” — and amounts to a bad deal for taxpayers, said Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, a nonprofit that tracks and analyzes economic development projects. The plants are unlikely to deliver anything close to $2 billion a year in public benefits, he said.
“It can only be accurately called a massive transfer of wealth from U.S. taxpayers to corporate shareholders,” he said.
Ammonia has long been a workhorse of the global economy, quietly underpinning modern agriculture. It’s the key ingredient in nitrogen fertilizer, and demand is expected to grow as global food production strains to keep pace with population growth.
Now, producers say it could play a far larger role — not just as fertilizer but as a climate-friendly fuel for ships and power plants.
When it’s burned as a fuel, ammonia doesn’t emit carbon dioxide (though it can produce nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas roughly 270 times more potent than carbon dioxide).
It can also be burned with other fuels in power plants or potentially used to store hydrogen for shipping and later conversion for use in fuel cells.
But the process commonly used to make ammonia carries a heavy climate cost.
Most production relies on hydrogen derived from natural gas, a process that releases carbon dioxide. Enormous amounts of energy — typically from fossil fuels — are then used to force hydrogen and nitrogen to combine under extreme heat and pressure.
Nitrogen fertilizer plants in the U.S. released more than 46 million tons of heat-trapping gases in 2021 — roughly the emissions of nine million cars running for a year — according to a report by the Environmental Integrity Project. Globally, almost 2% of carbon dioxide emissions come from making ammonia — or as much as the energy system emissions of South Africa, according to the International Energy Agency.
That’s where carbon capture comes in. The companies planning blue ammonia plants say they will isolate most of the carbon dioxide released, piping it deep underground for permanent storage.
Those claims are unlikely to hold up, said Cornell University professor Robert Howarth, an expert on greenhouse gas emissions and ammonia pollution.
“Is the industry correct in saying that they can produce a really, really low emissions fuel using natural gas as their original feedstock?” he asked. “The answer is no. It’s just never been done, and I don’t think it can be done.”
The majority of existing carbon capture facilities trap less than 60% of carbon dioxide, according to a 2023 review by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. “No existing project has consistently captured more than 80% of carbon,” the institute found.
Blue hydrogen — a prerequisite for blue ammonia — “is neither clean nor low-carbon,” and pursuing it would divert time and money from more effective climate solutions, the institute concluded.
In an email to Floodlight, Air Products spokesperson Christina Stephens said the company is “very confident in our proprietary technology that allows us to capture 95 percent of the CO2 emissions.” She did not elaborate.
Stacie, the St. Charles Clean Fuels representative, said its facility’s design will be “conducive to high capture rates.”
Experts also note that carbon capture itself is typically powered by natural gas, adding emissions and undercutting its climate benefits.
Compounding the problem are emissions of methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Methane is frequently emitted during drilling, processing, and transport of natural gas. More escapes in the process used to extract hydrogen for ammonia production.
Total methane emissions from the fertilizer industry could be more than 140 times higher than official estimates, one 2019 study found.
Stephens, the Air Products spokesperson, said the company believes previous research related to methane leakage has flaws that led to inaccurate conclusions.
Stacie, meanwhile, said St. Charles Clean Fuels will monitor and verify methane emissions through “operations control and third-party verification consistent with emerging best practices.”
Even if blue ammonia plants deliver the climate benefits their backers promise — benefits that experts dispute — their local impacts could still be substantial.
In 2024, the CF Industries Donaldsonville plant — near Gaignard’s house — released more toxic air pollutants than all but one other industrial site nationally, according to EPA data. The 7.1 million pounds of ammonia the plant released that year would more than fill the New Orleans Superdome, according to Kimberly Terrell, a research scientist for the Environmental Integrity Project.
Emissions from the planned blue ammonia plants could worsen respiratory health, Terrell said, with impacts extending far beyond the plant sites.
“I would be concerned about increasing asthma rates long term,” she said.
Ascension Parish, where three of the proposed blue ammonia plants would be built, hosts more than two dozen industrial facilities and already has the second highest amount of air emissions in the country, according to EPA data.
So the prospect of new ammonia plants in Ascension Parish worries Twila Collins.
She has lived her entire 55-year life in Modeste, a historic, predominantly Black community along the Mississippi River. If CF Industries gets its way, a massive ammonia plant would rise roughly a mile from her home.
Her message for the company is blunt: “Leave us alone and find somewhere else to go where there’s nobody living, so you won’t disrupt a community.”
Industrial pollution already drifts into her neighborhood, bringing smells “like a landfill,” she said, and a new ammonia plant would add another layer of pollution — and another set of health risks.
In a 2024 report, CF Industries said its employees “regularly maintain, replace, and update equipment” to reduce emissions.
But under its draft permit for the Blue Point plant, the company would be allowed to release more than 1,100 tons of air pollutants each year — equivalent to the weight of more than 27 fully loaded tractor trailers. That includes more than 140 tons of ammonia and more than 580 tons of carbon monoxide.
Collins said she can name more than 30 people in Modeste who suffer from cancer or respiratory problems. The issue is deeply personal. She herself has struggled with cancer. And in 2002, her 9-year-old son died of an asthma attack. He had struggled with asthma all his life, but Collins still wonders whether the industrial pollution surrounding Modeste helped trigger the attack that killed him.
She also worries about what could go wrong if something fails — an accident, a leak, or worse — because ammonia production and carbon dioxide transport involve well-documented industrial risks.
CF Industries’ Donaldsonville plant has a history of deadly accidents: A 2000 explosion and fire killed three workers and injured at least eight others, and a 2013 blast killed one worker and injured eight more.
This past November, an explosion at another CF Industries plant in Yazoo City, Mississippi, led to an ammonia leak and prompted the evacuation of nearby residents.
While supporters emphasize the economic boost and high-paying jobs the projects could bring, many local residents have turned out at public hearings to oppose them.
So many people packed a hearing room on the St. Charles project in 2024 that it had to be canceled and rescheduled in a larger venue.
Some of the public fears have centered on the carbon dioxide pipelines that would be needed to make the projects work.
Air Products, for instance, has proposed piping millions of tons of carbon dioxide 38 miles to be stored a mile underneath Lake Maurepas. The project would be “the world’s largest permanent carbon dioxide sequestration endeavor to date,” according to the Louisiana Department of Economic Development.
At a November public hearing on the project, Air Products vice president Andrew Connolly said the company has an “unsurpassed safety record.”
“All pipelines will be monitored 24-7, and we will meet or exceed all pipeline regulations,” he said.
More than 300 people turned out for that public hearing, according to Dustin Renaud, a spokesperson for the environmental law group Earthjustice. Among the more than 50 people who spoke, all but three opposed the project.
Opponents have warned of what could happen if a carbon dioxide pipeline ruptures, as happened in 2020 in Satartia, Mississippi. That disaster sent 45 people to the hospital and left some residents unconscious in their homes and cars. Starved of oxygen, cars stalled or couldn’t start, making evacuation difficult.
The Air Products pipeline would run within half a mile of Sorrento Primary School, an elementary school in Ascension Parish with more than 600 students. An expert hired by Earthjustice concluded that a pipeline rupture could endanger the schoolchildren, along with residents of a nearby subdivision.
Stephens, the Air Products spokesperson, said the company will run the pipeline deeper than is required by code in the school’s vicinity. The pipeline will also have more shutoff valves than required, she said.
“We have a long safe history of operating the largest hydrogen pipeline network in the world right here in Louisiana,” she wrote.
Stacie, the St. Charles Clean Fuels representative, said the company will incorporate “detection systems, automated shutdowns, mechanical integrity programs, and emergency response planning” — consistent with federal rules and “lessons learned from prior incidents.”
Still, some residents worry.
“We don’t have a good evacuation route,” said St. James Parish resident Gail LeBoeuf, who co-founded the environmental justice group Inclusive Louisiana. “If something would happen, we would just be stuck like Chuck.”
The companies behind the blue ammonia projects have said they will bring jobs and millions of dollars into the state economy — a message that has found a receptive audience in the state capital and some city halls.
CF Industries did not respond to Floodlight’s questions about its proposed plant, while Clean Hydrogen Works declined to answer questions.
Amid public opposition, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry in October announced a moratorium on new carbon capture projects. The order halted the state’s review of new permits for projects that would inject carbon dioxide underground, while allowing existing applications to continue — including the blue ammonia projects already underway.
In touting the CF Industries proposal last April, Landry noted that the company has been operating in the state for more than 50 years. “We don’t get to grow food in this country without the hard work of CF Industries and its employees,” he said.
The oil and gas industry — which has strong ties to the ammonia and fertilizer industries — has for years been Landry’s largest industrial sector donor. It has contributed more than $1.1 million to his campaigns, according to data from FollowTheMoney.org.
Donaldsonville Mayor Leroy Sullivan has also spoken out in favor of the proposals by CF Industries and Clean Hydrogen Works.
“The benefits outweigh the things they’re saying,” he told WBRZ last year.
“These plants are safer. They’re better for the economy than some of the other industries that may be in the area.”
Sullivan previously worked at CF Industries for 26 years. In 2000, he was badly injured in an explosion at the Donaldsonville plant and spent more than a month recovering in a burn unit.
“It almost killed me,” he said at a public hearing last year on the Ascension Clean Energy proposal.
Neither Sullivan nor Landry responded to Floodlight’s requests for interviews.
For her part, Gaignard feels let down.
“What hurts the most is we’re watching the leaders that we elected … support these companies instead of supporting the community,” she said.
There are cleaner ways to make ammonia.
Instead of extracting hydrogen from natural gas and then trying to capture the CO2, producers can use renewable electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. That “green hydrogen” can then be combined with nitrogen to make what’s known as “green ammonia.”
At least one large-scale green ammonia plant is already operating. In Chifeng, China, a facility powered by wind turbines and solar panels began industrial-scale production in 2025. By 2028, the plant is expected to produce 1.5 million tons of green ammonia annually.
In the U.S., developers have proposed green ammonia plants in Texas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Washington.
“Instead of making this big labyrinth of pipes and equipment and sending CO2 everywhere and using more energy, you can simply produce that hydrogen with electricity from solar and wind,” said Jacobson, the Stanford professor.
In the debate over blue ammonia, the stakes are high.
For ammonia producers, the projects promise billions in federal tax credits and a foothold in emerging energy markets. They also offer oil and gas companies a way to delay the phaseout of fossil fuels, critics say.
“It’s a great way to lock in oil and gas infrastructure … Something that we should be getting away from, as opposed to locking in for years and years to come,” said Alexandra Shaykevich, a research manager at the Environmental Integrity Project who tracks oil and gas projects.
For residents along Louisiana’s Cancer Alley, the stakes are more immediate. They’re being asked to live with new plants, new pipelines, and new risks in places that have already absorbed decades of pollution.
But Gaignard plans to keep fighting for her community.
“I don’t look at this as red and blue and the left and the right,” she said. “We need to start looking at humanity.”
Floodlight is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powers stalling climate action.
Startup CarbonQuest already proved it could snatch carbon emissions from the gas-fired boilers that heat New York City high-rises. This year, it’s moving into a big new market: carbon capture for the fossil-fueled engines that generate power in remote or campus settings around the world.
Tourmaline, Canada’s largest natural gas producer, collects gas at its Banshee plant near Edson, Alberta. It uses compressors to move the gas through the pipeline network and runs gas-burning engines — akin to supersize versions of what propels a truck — to power those compressors. Now, Canary Media has learned, Tourmaline has contracted with CarbonQuest to capture carbon emissions from an engine driving its compressors, proving out a new use for the technology.
Over the next 10 months, the startup is assembling its equipment into easily transportable containers at a factory in Spokane, Washington, prior to installation at Banshee. The machinery will hook up to the engine’s exhaust stream and use a process called vacuum pressure swing absorption to pull out and collect carbon dioxide. While elsewhere, CarbonQuest’s CO2 has been turned into concrete, here it will go down an existing well for permanent sequestration underground.
The carbon capture industry stands out among climatetech sectors for its distressing frequency of technological disappointments and outright fraud. CarbonQuest, which launched in 2019 and raised $20 million in Series A funding last year, differentiates itself from such dubious company by making humble promises and following through. Its first commercial installation has been capturing boiler emissions in a 30-story apartment building near New York City’s Lincoln Center since early 2022, and the company is now hooking up its fifth system to clean up gas heating in the metropolis.
Carbon capture, which collects carbon dioxide from smokestacks — and the related field of direct air capture, which grabs trace amounts from the air — has struggled with energy requirements: Burning too much electricity to isolate the carbon dioxide undercuts the climate case for doing so in the first place. Rather than jump to massive-scale carbon capture (with massive energy needs), CarbonQuest has chosen to hone its tech at a level that others thought was too small to bother with, said Anna Pavlova, senior vice president for strategy, market development, and sustainability.
“Our goal is to help us move faster to reducing emissions,” Pavlova said. “That’s what we’re trying to prove. And we’re trying to prove it on maybe not the gigantic scale, but the good-enough scale where results still matter.”
Compressors might not be well known outside the industry, but they play a crucial role in the pipeline network that supplies much of America’s home heating, plus 40% of U.S. power generation today. Some regions depend far more on gas: Even the climate-hawk states of New England, for instance, use gas for 55% of their electricity. There’s a tangible climate benefit in reducing emissions from infrastructure that is very much needed for the foreseeable future.
Indeed, U.S. natural gas pipelines make use of more than 5,400 compressors — all systems that CarbonQuest could theoretically slash emissions from with the tech it’s bringing to Canada.
The Alberta installation also portends impact far beyond the niche of gas pipeline compressors. With this project, CarbonQuest jumps from knowing how to decarbonize boilers to knowing how to decarbonize engines, Pavlova said. That’s crucial, she added, because “engines are in many places.”
The type of engines that run compressors serve small-scale power generation all over the place: university campuses, hospitals, industrial sites, and, increasingly, AI data centers that want to produce their own electricity behind the meter. CarbonQuest’s first boiler installation grabs about 1,000 metric tons per year. Soon, its equipment will process 1,500 metric tons per year from the compressor engine, Pavlova said.
This will mark the first time CarbonQuest is including a “metal-organic framework” absorbent — a material engineered by the company Captivate Technology to capture carbon more efficiently. Anything CarbonQuest can do to suck up more pollution with less energy helps make the process more scalable.
Pavlova is particularly excited to prove that this technology can work effectively at the carbon dioxide concentrations that come out of gas engines. Gas boilers typically produce exhaust that’s 8% to 10% carbon dioxide, she said, whereas the engine exhaust will be only about 5% CO2. (Larger gas turbines and coal power plants have even lower concentrations, part of why carbon capture hasn’t worked well for them.)
This is just a stepping stone, however. CarbonQuest got the project’s $4.1 million budget funded by grants from Alberta and the Canadian National Gas Innovation Fund, and the equipment will be able to catch only a small portion of the compressor site’s emissions. But it will put the technology to the test in a real commercial setting, and CarbonQuest will get paid via a long-term service agreement to keep its system in good functioning order. The startup is already working to close “fully commercial” deals for gas compression engines in the U.S., Pavlova said.
To deliver on that potential, CarbonQuest needs to line up customers that care about reducing emissions and find other ways to monetize carbon capture, either through regulatory credits for sequestration or by creatively reusing the carbon itself. Neither option is particularly outlandish these days: The commodity price for carbon dioxide is quite high now, and the federal tax credit for carbon capture survived the Trump administration’s budget law. The trick has been finding people who can actually do the capturing part.
America’s fledgling carbon-removal industry is on edge following funding cuts from the Trump administration — and rumors of even further clawbacks to follow.
On Tuesday, a list of potential U.S. Department of Energy award terminations shared with Canary Media, and which circulated in Washington, included two giant direct-air-capture (DAC) hubs planned in Louisiana and Texas. Each project has received about $50 million to begin planning and developing CO2-sucking facilities, and together they are slated to receive up to $1.1 billion in federal support.
However, a spokesperson for DOE said that it is “incorrect to suggest those two projects have been terminated” and that no determinations have been made beyond the award cancellations announced last week. On Oct. 2, the agency said it was scrapping 321 grants totaling over $7.5 billion — including nearly $50 million to help 10 smaller DAC initiatives begin concept and engineering studies for future installations.
“The Department continues to conduct an individualized and thorough review of financial awards made by the previous administration,” DOE press secretary Ben Dietderich said in an email to Canary Media. Following last week’s cancellations, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said more cuts would be announced, though he did not specify further.
The real and rumored grant terminations reflect the chaos and confusion that’s engulfed virtually every federally backed energy project since the start of the second Trump administration. Even developers whose awards haven’t been slashed — at least not yet — must try to navigate the lengthy and complicated funding process with an agency wracked by layoffs.
For carbon removal in particular, “a lot of these projects have kind of been in limbo this year, not sure of if they should commence and continue their work,” said Courtni Holness, the managing policy adviser for the nonprofit Carbon180. “There’s a lot of uncertainty around if they’re going to get continued funding, if they’ll be able to be reimbursed.”
While cutting greenhouse gas emissions is the most urgent and necessary way to tackle climate change, the world will also need to remove CO2 from the atmosphere in order to avert the worst consequences of a warming planet, climate scientists say. However, most carbon-removal solutions are early-stage, expensive, and largely unproven at any meaningful scale, making government support critical to their success.
The Biden administration launched the Regional Direct Air Capture Hubs program in 2023 with $3.5 billion in funding provided by the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law. The DAC initiative was part of a broader push by the DOE to help the private sector deploy novel technologies at commercial scale.
Funding for the Louisiana and Texas megaprojects “represented the largest ever public investment in carbon removal,” said Erin Burns, executive director of Carbon180. If completed as planned, the hubs are each expected to create thousands of jobs in the regions where they’ll operate.
The South Texas DAC Hub is an initiative of the Occidental Petroleum subsidiary 1PointFive. The project is located just south of Corpus Christi and is expected to be capable of removing over 1 million metric tons of CO2 per year — roughly equal to the annual emissions from 2.5 gas-fired power plants. The project will use technology developed by Carbon Engineering, a company that 1PointFive acquired for $1.1 billion in November 2023.
DAC plants can use giant industrial fans to draw in large amounts of air, then separate out the carbon using chemical solutions or filtered materials. The captured CO2 can be injected into deep geological formations, or it can be repurposed to make valuable industrial products, such as concrete and synthetic fuels.
1PointFive didn’t immediately return Canary’s request for comment on the purported DOE funding cuts.
The company is separately building another DAC facility in the Texas Permian Basin that is designed to capture up to 500,000 metric tons of CO2 annually and could begin operating later this year. That project, called Stratos, will likely use captured carbon for “enhanced oil recovery,” a process that involves pumping the gas into older oil wells to force up any remaining fossil fuels.
Although Stratos didn’t receive a DOE grant, the operation will still likely benefit from the federal 45Q tax credit, which was expanded under the GOP budget law that passed in July — mainly for the benefit of carbon-capturing projects linked to oil production.
Meanwhile, in Louisiana, a coalition of companies is building a DAC hub called Project Cypress. Climeworks and Heirloom, two leading carbon-removal developers, are partnering with the applied-sciences organization Battelle to design and operate two facilities, which together are intended to capture over 1 million metric tons of carbon per year. The company Gulf Coast Sequestration will then take the captured CO2 and permanently store it in a deep saline aquifer.
Climeworks, a Swiss company, will use its fan-driven technology, a version of which is already operating in Iceland. The U.S. startup Heirloom will build a separate plant for its own DAC process, which involves heating trays of limestone inside kilns to turn the mineral into a “sponge” that absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere.
Vikrum Aiyer, Heirloom’s head of global policy, said on Tuesday that the company wasn’t “aware of a decision from DOE” to cancel its federal award and that the companies continue “to productively engage with the administration in a project review.”
Both the South Texas and Louisiana DAC hubs still face significant hurdles to crossing the finish line — including sourcing massive amounts of clean electricity to run their machines — even if they ultimately receive federal funding as promised. 1PointFive, for example, has run into local opposition, in part because of its association with the fossil fuel industry. Community advocates in both states have said they felt shut out of early planning processes that should have included them.
For DAC proponents, rescinding federal awards means the U.S. could risk losing out on the potential jobs and investment these first-of-a-kind projects are expected to create, especially as other countries press ahead. China, for example, has announced plans to build 37 domestic “carbon management and removal” projects by 2030, according to the Carbon Removal Alliance.
“Carbon removal is essential to meeting our climate targets and fueling energy security — that’s why it’s the world’s next trillion-dollar industry,” Carbon Removal Alliance and another advocacy group, the Carbon Business Council, said in a joint statement.
An Ohio bill that would establish rules for underground carbon dioxide storage is being shaped behind the scenes by oil and gas companies that stand to benefit from the legislation.
House Bill 170 would pave the way for companies to pump waste carbon dioxide from industrial plants and hydrogen production deep underground as a way to lower their emissions. Companies would lease subsurface property rights long-term and eventually transfer liability for the stored waste to the state.
Oil and gas industry groups have been busy for months vetting bill sponsors, drafting legislation, writing talking points for lawmakers, meeting with regulators, and coordinating with other industry stakeholders.
Industry lobbyists often play an active role in pushing for legislation that will favor them. But public records shared with Canary Media by Fieldnotes, a watchdog group that investigates the oil and gas industry, show that the American Petroleum Institute and the Ohio Oil and Gas Association have played an outsize role in shaping the bill.
Supporters say carbon capture and sequestration, or CCS, is necessary to lower greenhouse gas emissions that drive human-caused climate change, especially for hard-to-electrify industries. As lawmakers and regulators craft rules for the technology, the stakes are high, with potentially large risks and rewards for industry and the public.
Carbon capture is “the new Wild West…where there is a lot of money to be made,” said Jennifer Stewart, the American Petroleum Institute’s director of climate and environmental, social, and governance policy, at a hearing on last year’s carbon capture bill in the Ohio Senate. She suggested that tax credits could offset the costs of reducing greenhouse gas pollution and that companies could also sell carbon offset credits to other businesses.
Left unsaid was that the petroleum industry was then facing Biden-era emissions rules for natural gas plants, which an aide for bill sponsor Sen. Tim Schaffer (R-Lancaster) flagged in an internal memo as “the reason for the push for carbon capture.” The aide’s memo cited an American Petroleum Institute summary of what carbon capture “is and why it is good for the oil and gas industry.”
Although the Trump administration now proposes to repeal those rules, the oil and gas industry still faces increased competition from renewables as the energy transition continues. Carbon capture and storage could serve as a way to continue promoting their products.
Ohio is not alone in the push for carbon capture laws. More than 20 state legislatures have passed or have been considering such bills, according to a spring 2024 presentation by the American Petroleum Institute.
The laws are necessary if states want a lead role on permitting and regulating wells to pump waste carbon dioxide deep underground. As of May 30, four states already had federal approval for that role, called primacy. Nine others had applied.
The public records shared by Fieldnotes show that during the last legislative session, spanning 2023 and 2024, people at the American Petroleum Institute and the Ohio Oil and Gas Association vetted Rep. Monica Robb Blasdel (R-Columbiana) as a potential bill sponsor. Industry representatives offered to arrange media opportunities for Sen. Al Landis (R-Dover). They also provided talking points and supplied wording for initial one-page “placeholder” bills. Robb Blasdel, Schaffer, and Landis introduced identical one-page bills in December 2023.
In February 2024, the industry groups sent a draft substitute bill, with details for the carbon capture program. Ohio’s Legislative Service Commission, which reviews bills for form, clarity, and fiscal impacts, raised questions about the bill with Schaffer’s office. His office had the Ohio Oil and Gas Association provide answers.
Also that winter, the petroleum association sent Robb Blasdel’s office the Ohio Department of Natural Resources’ alternative bill language “in response to the industry draft bill.” The group subsequently supplied her office with an analysis of differences in the industry’s and agency’s language. The agency generally wanted industry to pay higher initial fees, provide financial bonding, and wait decades longer before the state assumed liability for closed wells, along with other stricter provisions.
Although representatives from the industry groups met with staff from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources to discuss terms in May 2024, staff members apparently didn’t talk with Robb Blasdel about the bill until months later. “This will be our first convo with Rep. Blasdel about the subject,” wrote Benjamin Bruns, the agency’s legislative affairs director, on September 12.
A detailed bill was finally swapped out for the earlier placeholder version in the House Natural Resources Committee last December. Along with Robb Blasdel, representatives of both the Ohio Oil and Gas Association and the American Petroleum Institute spoke in its favor.
Despite HB 170 and Senate Bill 136 having terms nearly identical to those of the 2024 substitute bill, Schaffer’s aide gave both petroleum groups a chance for advance review before the bills were introduced this year. House Rep. Bob Peterson (R-Sabina) is now a cosponsor with Robb Blasdel. Replacing Landis as a cosponsor of SB 136 is freshman Sen. Brian Chavez (R-Marietta), who has worked and owned companies in the oil and gas industry. He has not answered Canary Media’s questions about whether the bill might benefit any of his businesses.
After hearings in the Ohio House this spring, Robb Blasdel’s office asked for revised bill language, which the American Petroleum Institute’s representative supplied on June 2. Less than 90 minutes later, her office invited petroleum industry people and others to an “interested party” meeting on June 5. Among them were staff and lobbyists for carbon capture companies and other bill supporters, along with representatives for the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation and the Nature Conservancy, which had identified themselves as interested parties (versus saying they were for or against the bill).
No opponents were invited, despite numerous concerns raised by the Buckeye Environmental Network, the Freshwater Accountability Project, and others, including whether provisions in the bill would infringe on property rights, lower home values, and cause health and safety problems, among other issues.
A new substitute bill was introduced during the June 18 meeting of the House Natural Resources Committee, which Robb Blasdel chairs. More hearings are planned for the fall.
Besides documenting industry’s push for Ohio to pass a carbon capture and storage law, the public records raise questions about whose interests lawmakers are serving.
As Fieldnotes researcher Julia Kane sees it, industry groups that stand to profit have “been in the driver’s seat of this process…I’d think in a democracy you’d want the lawmakers looking out for the interests of the public and talking to all the stakeholders,” she said.
Neither Chavez nor Schaffer responded to Canary Media’s requests for comment. Peterson’s aide, Kylie Fauber, said the representative would defer any comments to Robb Blasdel. She has not answered Canary Media’s questions for this story.
The American Petroleum Institute “regularly engages with policy makers on both sides of the aisle to educate on the critical role of American energy and to share our industry’s priorities,” said Christina Polesovsky, the organization’s associate director for Ohio, in response to Canary Media’s questions about critics who see the group as having outsize influence. She added that the group has provided on-the-record testimony through the committee process.
The Ohio Oil and Gas Association did not answer Canary Media’s request for comment for this story.
Opposing parties have also testified, and Robb Blasdel met with two representatives of the Buckeye Environmental Network on June 4. But they and other opponents were left out of the “interested party” meeting on June 5, before the most recent substitute bill was introduced.
“The cake is most of the way baked, and the oil and gas industry kind of set the foundation for the entire conversation,” Kane said.
While the extent of industry’s involvement in the carbon capture bills wasn’t clear before the most recent batches of the public records were released to Fieldnotes this spring, it’s not necessarily surprising.
“This is the system that we’re in,” said Stephanie Howse-Jones, a Cleveland City Council member who served for seven years as a Democratic representative in the Ohio House. Lobbyists often provide draft bills and talking points. Lawmakers often use those talking points when speaking about legislation, but they don’t always read the full text of their bills, she noted.
Howse-Jones said Ohioans need to understand specifically how bills will impact them and their communities. Getting that information may be more challenging after Ohio’s latest budget bill changed the state’s public records law to shield lawmakers’ notes and some internal communications from disclosure until the next legislative session. But more transparency isn’t enough, she said.
“Ohioans must demand more of their state legislature,” Howse-Jones said. Until campaign finance reform takes place, “most of us won’t be able to compete with the dollars. But we do have organizing-people power.” That goes beyond voting and includes taking an active role in organizing and communicating constituent concerns, she said.
Tristan Rader (D-Lakewood) said he hasn’t made up his mind about the carbon capture bills but has questions, especially whether the waste will escape from the underground spaces in which it will be stored. Yet he sees an imbalance in power at the legislature, where industry often holds more sway.
“The real problem is that the communities that are impacted by the activity of these organizations’ wells have a very minimal presence and limited input. And it’s not for lack of trying,” Rader said.
PIPELINES: Federal pipeline regulators for the first time propose guidelines for pipelines transporting gaseous carbon dioxide, including a requirement that operators prepare first responders for emergencies. (Iowa Capital Dispatch)
ALSO: Public safety and agriculture concerns competed with economic development arguments as hundreds of people, mostly opponents, packed a South Dakota hearing on a CO2 pipeline permit. (South Dakota Searchlight)
SOLAR:
FOSSIL FUELS: Michigan House Republicans propose legislation to exempt 13 Upper Peninsula gas plants from the state’s clean energy law, claiming they’re needed for reliability. (WEMU)
CLIMATE: An Iowa Department of Education committee tasked with updating science standards says terms related to climate change were watered down from what they proposed before being released for public comment. (Cedar Rapids Gazette)
NUCLEAR: Federal regulators express concerns over a plant owner’s “very, very demanding” schedule to reopen its shuttered Michigan nuclear plant by this fall. (Michigan Public)
BIOGAS: Iowa regulators fine a dairy farm $20,000 for starting construction without a permit on portions of a manure digester system that would produce biogas from methane. (Cedar Rapids Gazette)
WIND: Utility officials say a planned 112-turbine wind project in North Dakota would provide a $100 million boost to the local economy. (Grand Forks Herald)
RENEWABLES: Michigan rules shifting authority over wind and solar projects to state regulators will remain in effect as dozens of local governments challenge the new law, a state appeals court rules. (MLive, subscription)
GRID:
COMMENTARY:
Work headed by an Ohio waste-to-energy company to make plastic from biodigester byproducts is among seven projects recently selected for federal grants to develop new ways to use captured carbon dioxide.
The grants aim to advance the federal government’s goal of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 in order to address ongoing climate change.
Quasar Energy Group, headquartered south of Cleveland in Independence, designs and builds anaerobic digesters, in which bacteria break down manure, food waste, or other organic materials. Methane is the systems’ main gas output and can be used to power generators or heat buildings, among other uses.
But anaerobic digesters also produce carbon dioxide, another greenhouse gas which has fewer commercial uses. Customers today include fertilizer manufacturers, oil and gas companies, and food and beverage makers. But those markets are tiny compared to the amount of CO₂ scientists think will need to be removed from industrial emissions, or even pulled from the atmosphere, to deal with climate change.
There’s a limit to how much carbon dioxide will be able to be stored in the ground, and community opposition to pipelines is another barrier to Midwest carbon capture plans. Using the carbon in products — such as cement or plastics — can be a useful alternative, especially if it displaces other fossil fuel inputs.
On Oct. 9, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management announced funding for seven projects aimed at commercializing new approaches to incorporating carbon dioxide into products. The selections are aimed at hard-to-decarbonize sectors, said Ian Rowe, division director for carbon dioxide conversion at DOE’s office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management.
“There’s not going to be a non-carbon solution for those needs in the future, but we should make them from more sustainable forms of carbon,” Rowe said. “And carbon dioxide represents a feedstock that you can use.”
Ohio is already a leader in plastics production that relies heavily on the fossil fuel industry. Hundreds of companies across the state play a role in manufacturing or the supply chain. And midstream processing provides a ready supply of natural gas feedstocks from the Utica shale play.
Quasar Energy’s team designed its process for making plastic so it will work well with biodigesters. Basically, the project will use lipids from algae as a feedstock for a type of polyurethane. Liquid effluent from the biodigester could help grow the algae and supply nutrients for it, such as nitrogen and phosphorus.
Carbon dioxide from the biogester’s gas would be another ingredient in the process. The project team estimates the process could cut carbon dioxide emissions at least 25%, compared to current technology for making the plastic.
The process already works on a bench-scale level in the lab, said Tao Dong, a chemical engineer with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado, who is also working on the project. Other team members named in the group’s grant application to DOE include Caixia “Ellen” Wan at the University of Missouri, Xumeng Ge at Quasar, and Ashton Zeller, director of research at Algix.
Costs are an important factor for the Quasar team’s project or any other products aimed at displacing those made from fossil fuel sources. Those costs include expenses for “cleaning up” the biodigester gas to separate methane from carbon dioxide. But a chunk of that expense also can be allocated to the separated methane, which has its own value for energy, either for on-site use or for sale for use elsewhere.
In other words, using the gas for making the plastic and for energy helps the economics for both uses, versus just flaring the gas into the atmosphere.
“Our process can be cost-effective,” said Yebo Li, Quasar’s chief innovation and science officer.
The plastic made from the process also has an advantage from being a non-isocyanate polyurethane, said Mel Kurtz, president of Quasar. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration links isocyanates to various health problems, and some are potential carcinogens. So, a polyurethane plastic that doesn’t have them should reduce risks for workers at factories who would then use the material to manufacture products, such as shoes or other items.
“If [farms] can add another revenue stream, that can improve the economics” for biodigesters on farms, said Andy Olsen, a senior policy advocate for the Environmental Law & Policy Center, whose work focuses on energy issues relating to agriculture and is not part of the project team.
It’s also important to make sure staff are properly trained to use and maintain the equipment properly, Olsen added, noting potential problems with leaked gases. Others question whether emissions offsets from some biodigesters have been overstated.
The Quasar project team still faces hurdles. Work under the grant will focus on identifying and addressing risks so the technology can be scaled up.
One challenge will be maintaining algae ponds over time to provide the lipids for the process. Another will be optimizing the process for making them into small chemical building blocks called monomers and then assembling them into polymers, which are the plastic. Maintaining the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions over time also will be important.
Other Midwest grant recipients include LanzaTech, an Illinois sustainable fuels company, and Washington University in St. Louis, which will develop a low-carbon process to convert carbon dioxide to high-quality carbon nanotubes. Those will be tested for use as anodes for lithium-ion batteries.
Whether these and other carbon management projects can scale up quickly enough for the United States to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 is a big question, said Rowe at DOE.
The energy source for the production process will also make a big difference, Rowe said. Algae can make their own food with carbon dioxide and sunlight. But it takes energy to maintain the ponds throughout the year. The equipment to process the algae and then make the lipids and biodigesters’ carbon dioxide into polyurethane also needs energy.
“Carbon management strategies go hand in hand with an increased deployment of cheap clean electricity. So, a lot of these won’t work without the other,” Rowe said. On the flip side, “if that energy does not come from clean sources, you’ve just produced something that is worse for the environment than if you dug it up and just used fossil carbon.”
CARBON CAPTURE: Recent leaks at an Illinois carbon storage well have raised concerns among some residents and environmental advocates as the Biden administration ramps up funding for what it sees as a key climate tool. (Grist)
EMISSIONS: The Minneapolis City Council overrides the mayor’s veto of a new fee on large emitters’ carbon emissions after extending the start date and ordering a study to address legal concerns. (Star Tribune)
INDUSTRY: Low-carbon steel making techniques would help reduce air pollution and climate emissions from coal-based iron making furnaces and coke plants that are concentrated in the Midwest, a new report finds. (Canary Media)
RENEWABLES:
COAL:
OIL & GAS: Labor advocates say training unionized oil and gas workers to plug orphaned oil and gas wells would help create jobs and economic security for workers in the field. (New Republic)
EFFICIENCY: A South Dakota rural advocacy group submits a petition calling on Gov. Kristi Noem to reconsider her decision rejecting $69 million in federal funding for home energy efficiency rebates. (South Dakota Searchlight)
NUCLEAR: Democrats in highly competitive U.S. Senate races embrace nuclear energy as a way to attract center-right voters and provide grid resilience. (HuffPost)
CLEAN ENERGY:
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
GEOTHERMAL: St. Paul, Minnesota breaks ground on the state’s largest networked geothermal system that will heat and cool buildings as part of a 112-acre redevelopment of a former golf course. (Pioneer Press, subscription)
CARBON CAPTURE: A southern California county greenlights a firm’s proposal to store up to 48 million tons of captured carbon in an old oil and gas field, but advocates say the project is a “convoluted scheme” that incentivizes pollution. (CalMatters)
COAL:
GRID:
WIND: A federal historic preservation agency urges the Bureau of Land Management to require the proposed Lava Ridge wind project in Idaho to avoid impacts to a World War II incarceration facility. (E&E News, subscription)
BATTERIES: A Colorado firm plans to use a $50 million federal grant to scale up production of sulfide electrolytes designed to increase batteries’ energy density and stability. (Big Pivots)
SOLAR:
CLEAN ENERGY:
UTILITIES: Advocates criticize California regulators for approving two utilities’ double-digit rate hikes, saying it will inflame an affordability crisis and slow the energy transition. (E&E News, subscription)
CARBON CAPTURE: The U.S. Energy Department drafts a strategy for developing “dozens” of carbon capture and storage facilities by 2050 and building infrastructure, oversight, and a workforce to serve them. (E&E News, subscription; news release)
ALSO: Exxon Mobil announces it’s secured leases for 271,000 acres in waters off Texas for an offshore carbon capture project. (Reuters)
NUCLEAR: A newly updated U.S. Energy Department report makes a case for immediately launching a buildout of large-scale nuclear reactors in hopes of tripling the country’s current 100 GW of nuclear power capacity. (Canary Media)
COAL: Five of the biggest U.S. coal plants have set dates for closure or a shift to another fuel, and a sixth is reportedly planning to switch to natural gas as well. (Inside Climate News)
GRID:
UTILITIES: Oregon residents file a first-of-its-kind class-action lawsuit accusing the state’s largest natural gas utility of misleading customers about its carbon reduction plan and using that program’s funds to promote fossil fuels. (OPB)
POLITICS:
SOLAR:
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: Delaware will use $14.3 million in federal funding to install chargers along I-95 as part of a multistate effort to reduce the emissions of the trucking industry. (WHYY)
CARBON CAPTURE: A proposed multi-state carbon pipeline would capture emissions from ethanol plants’ corn fermentation process, but wouldn’t address about 7 million annual metric tons emitted by industrial machinery at the plants. (South Dakota Searchlight)
GRID:
NUCLEAR:
PIPELINES:
CLIMATE: A new study finds very little research on the ways that funding from oil and gas companies influences climate research, and whether it may be creating bias or conflicts of interest. (Inside Climate News)
UTILITIES:
SOLAR:
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