ONE of the important technological holy grails of climate mitigation is carbon capture, or the physical removal of carbon dioxide (CO2) from emissions or the ambient air, and then either storing it deep underground or using it for other purposes. The concept is considered so important, in fact, that the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assumes it would be deployed on a massive scale in all scenarios limiting global warming to less than 2.0 degrees Celsius by the year 2100.
The problem is that the idea faces long and perhaps insurmountable odds of ever being utilized on a scale that would make a difference. It is not that it is particularly exotic technology, having been around in one form or another for decades, but that it is expensive, energy-intensive and rejected by most environmentalists as an unnecessarily complicated distraction from other more feasible paths, such as renewable energy. It is also a tough sell to attract investors; the market for CO2 as an industrial product is not a particularly lucrative one as supply overwhelmingly outstrips demand, and commercializing simply storing CO2 underground has proven challenging, to say the least.
While carbon capture projects are nevertheless slowly being developed, what has been accomplished so far is inconsequential. According to a 2025 study by the Imperial College London, about 383 million metric tons of CO2 was sequestered between 1996 and 2024, most of it from oil and gas processing operations. That sounds impressive, until one remembers that annual CO2 emissions are about 38 billion metric tons. In other words, it took eight years to remove 10 percent of the CO2 our industrial civilization produces in a single year.
The State of California, however, is forging ahead to try to build up a carbon capture industry. At the beginning of this month, state regulators finalized rules for the construction of CO2 pipelines in the state, something that was previously banned. This is considered a critical step in making carbon capture a more attractive investment, and followed the successful launch of a carbon capture project in May by California Resources Corp. (CRC), the state’s largest oil company.
The CRC project takes CO2 from its own natural gas-processing plant, which is fed by wells in the nearby Elk Hills oil field, located in the San Joaquin Valley west of Bakersfield in central California. A depleted area of the oil field has been designated “Carbon TerraVault 1,” and is where the collected CO2 is being stored. CRC hopes to ramp up production to eventually inject 100,000 metric tons of CO2 per year into the depleted oil reservoirs deep underground, where it could stay safely locked away for thousands of years if managed properly.
For many people in that part of the state, however, “safely” and “managed properly” are doing too much heavy lifting in descriptions of CRC’s project and its longer-term plans. First, there are concerns about whether or not the CO2 injected into the old oil field will actually stay there. The Elk Hills field is dotted with thousands of abandoned wells; CRC itself disclosed it owned more than 1,000 that have not produced in two years or more, and “several dozen” that have been idle for decades. There is no clear plan to clean all these up and seal them, and even if CRC did that work, that still leaves everyone else’s abandoned wells, some owned by companies that have not existed for decades. Add to this the seismic risk of the area — the San Andreas Fault runs just to the west of the Elk Hills field — and there is a very high risk that CRC might pump CO2 underground, only to have it escape elsewhere.
CRC, of course, has assured the state government and local communities it has things under control, but most aren’t buying it. This is all the more remarkable because Kern County, where the CRC facility and the Elk Hills field are located, is the heart of California’s petroleum industry, where people tend to be very tolerant of what the oil companies are doing. As one community activist interviewed by local TV news commented, “An oil and gas company that has failed to take care of oil wells for many years is now telling the community members, ‘It’s OK, you can trust us with a toxic gas.’”
The second bone of contention is the state’s approval of CO2 pipelines, which would be able to transport CO2 from other industrial sites or direct air capture CO2 facilities to storage areas such as CRC’s, or any of the current total of 11 the state is hoping to develop in the next several years. Critics say the regulations for the pipelines are inadequate, given how dangerous a leak could be. A proposal to require the addition of an odorant to the gas to aid in leak detection was thumbed down by regulators (CO2 is odorless and colorless), and there are no specific rules prohibiting the installation of pipelines near risky populated areas. The guidelines only say that they should be located “as far as practicable” from places such as schools, hospitals and residential neighborhoods.
Environmentalists have filed at least one lawsuit so far against CRC, and the state and county governments seeking to halt the project and the construction of any pipelines (although none are planned at the moment), at least until more thorough engineering and environmental assessments are conducted. The point of view taken by the plaintiffs is that despite their skepticism, they are not necessarily trying to stop the project or any other carbon capture developments permanently, but that regulations to prevent a disaster have to be in place before industry and policymakers rush into things because of presumed economic benefits.
ben.kritz@manilatimes.net
Bluesky: @benkritz.bsky.social
Website: www.badmannersgunclub.com
