Hundreds of miles of pipeline must be built, and built quickly, if California is to meet its fast-approaching deadline for removing millions of tons of climate-altering carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Such is the view of regulators, business groups and some academic institutions pushing a Herculean plan to build a maze of pipes across California to carry the carbon dioxide emissions from oil refineries, natural gas power plants and other sources to the Sacramento delta and the Central Valley, where it would be buried deep underground.
Carbon dioxide is a potent greenhouse gas and is among the pollutants driving the climate crisis by trapping heat in the atmosphere, triggering withering heats waves, rising sea levels and more frequent and intense storms.
The California Air Resources Board, the state’s climate emissions regulator, has set a target of capturing between 13 million and 20 million metric tons of carbon dioxide by 2030—the equivalent of removing 3 million to 4.8 million gas-powered cars from the road. It is part of a strategy to eliminate climate pollution from the state’s industrial sector at a cost of $290 million annually over the next decade.
Six companies are applying to the Environmental Protection Agency for permits to pump carbon dioxide underground. As of now, there are no such facilities in the state doing that.
The infrastructure to transport 50 million metric tons of carbon dioxide—which is half of what the state wants to capture by midcentury—would include 1,150 miles of new pipeline running through the cities of Long Beach, Richmond, San Diego, Burbank and others, according to a 2020 report by the nonprofit Energy Futures Initiative and Stanford University’s Center for Carbon Storage and Precourt Institute for Energy.
Once the carbon dioxide reaches its destination in the Central Valley or Sacramento, it would be pumped into the ground. While it’s generally agreed that removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is critical for the world to meet its climate goals, where to put it and how to get it there are fraught questions.
The miles of pipeline needed to carry a known asphyxiant worry some climate activists, who fear that a rupture or leak could be disastrous. Exposure to carbon dioxide can be fatal or cause serious health issues.
Four years ago in Satartia, Mississippi, a mudslide caused a 24-inch pipeline carrying carbon dioxide to rupture, and dozens of people a mile away lost consciousness or grew delirious. There were no deaths, but 49 people were hospitalized. In a federal lawsuit against pipeline operator Denbury Gulf Coast Pipelines LLC, settled last year, motorist Korinne Heying Koestler said she suffered seizures from a lack of oxygen after she tried helping others engulfed in “clouds” of what turned out to be carbon dioxide.
Yet in public statements and reports touted by the California Carbon Partnership, headed by the state Chamber of Commerce, moving this gas is treated as an economic matter, with little attention to safety risks or political obstacles. Those reports found it is cheaper to transport carbon dioxide hundreds of miles from emissions sources to injection sites by pipeline than moving it by truck, rail or barge.
At a May 15 policy briefing hosted by the partnership, a panel of experts described carbon dioxide capture technology as critical in the state’s efforts to tackle climate change. There have been no deaths since oil and gas companies first began piping carbon dioxide in the 1970s as part of drilling activities, said panelist Sarah Saltzer, the managing director of the Stanford Center for Carbon Storage, which receives funding from companies such as Chevron Corp., the California Resources Corp. and Exxon Mobil Corp.
Across the country, federal data show there were 76 incidents involving the release of carbon dioxide from pipelines between January 2010 and May 2024, totaling more than 66,800 barrels. They mostly occurred in rural settings, though some happened near churches and homes in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. The U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration reported hospitalizations only from the Satartia incident in February 2020.
Reached by email, Saltzer, who worked at Chevron for 25 years including managerial roles, said Stanford Center for Carbon Storage was planning its own review of carbon dioxide pipeline safety.
Steve Bohlen, another panelist and the senior director of Government and External Affairs at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, told Capital & Main he disputed the contention that panelists had downplayed the risks of carbon dioxide-carrying pipelines. They are sometimes exaggerated by opponents of carbon capture and sequestration, he said.
Those opponents generally want a faster transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. But California’s climate plan says carbon dioxide still needs to be captured from oil refineries, cement factories and natural gas power plants, even as emissions from cars and buildings improve.
Carbon dioxide “may need to be safely transferred by pipeline to the best geologic sequestration sites in the state,” said Lys Mendez, a spokesperson for the California Air Resources Board, in an email. Otherwise, California “will not be able to achieve the carbon dioxide removal targets” in its 2022 climate change-fighting blueprint.
Coalitions of environmentalists in California, the Gulf Coast and the Midwest are protesting plans to capture carbon dioxide and bury it underground, arguing that they pose a danger to communities already bearing the brunt of fossil fuel pollution. They also contended that carbon capture is being used as a tactic to prolong the use of oil, gas and coal, which scientists say must be phased out quickly to slow global warming.
Capturing carbon dioxide emissions and permanently burying them is a climate strategy supported by the United Nations, The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and other groups both inside and outside the oil and gas industry. But how much to use the technology remains an unsettled question.
A report by Democratic staffs of the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability and the Senate Budget Committee analyzed plans for capturing carbon by companies including Exxon Mobil Corp. and Shell USA Inc., based on subpoenaed emails and other documents. The companies’ “massive public-facing campaigns” contrasted with internal acknowledgements that “they are not planning to deploy the technology at the scale needed to solve the warming crisis,” the report found.
The federal government is facing the “greatest and fastest pipeline expansion” in U.S. history thanks to federal subsidies that became available in 2021 and 2022, according to a report published by the nonprofit Pipeline Safety Trust. Those subsidies could build up the nation’s carbon dioxide pipelines from a small network of 5,000 miles, mostly in remote oil fields, to more than 60,000 miles through heavily populated areas by 2050.
Bill Caram, the trust’s executive director, said current regulations do not take into consideration the scope of hazards from this ramp up. “We’ve been asking policy makers to ensure that the benefits as a climate solution are weighted against the risks you’re asking people to take on from these pipelines,” he said.
In 1991, federal rules for carbon dioxide-carrying pipelines were added to existing statutes for petroleum pipelines. They were inspired by a disastrous natural release of carbon dioxide from a lake in Cameroon that killed more than 1,700 people. Back then, carbon dioxide being transported in the U.S. came not from industrial facilities but from underground reservoirs: pumped, piped and reinjected to stimulate oil production.
The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration is finalizing new rules covering carbon dioxide pipelines, including a study of a potential impact radius for leaks and ruptures and requirements for emergency preparedness. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory is creating a national route-planning database “to guide routing decisions and increase transportation safety” for carbon dioxide pipelines.
In the meantime, several companies are planning major projects across the nation. One proposed by Summit Carbon Solutions would transport carbon dioxide through 2,000 miles of pipelines from dozens of ethanol refineries in five Midwestern states to injection sites in North Dakota.
Oil and gas companies are lobbying the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration to reject “overly broad” safety rules, according to a document submitted in March by the Liquid Energy Pipeline Association. They asserted that carbon dioxide pipelines are safer than pipes used to move natural gas or petroleum, though the risks are hardly comparable.
While the rupture of a hydrocarbon line can result in explosions, a carbon dioxide pipeline’s impact zone could extend for miles, and the gas lingers invisibly in the air with the potential to asphyxiate people and to disable vehicles such as those used by first responders, according to the Pipeline Safety Trust report.
Unlike other states, California has a law governing carbon capture that includes a provision preventing companies from transporting carbon dioxide by pipeline until federal rules are published, possibly as soon as August. That has proven to be a stumbling block for project developers, though some are moving forward with pipeline-dependent projects anyway.
The Montezuma NorCal Carbon Sequestration Hub is a plan to operate an underwater pipeline to gather carbon dioxide streams from coastal oil refineries and hydrogen producers in the Bay Area. The line would run carbon dioxide through San Pablo Bay, the Carquinez Strait and Suisun Bay to Solano County for burial underneath wetlands.
Jim Levine, the project’s manager, said he wants to secure agreements with companies to collect at least 6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year. He hopes the EPA issues a carbon dioxide injection permit by 2026.
There is little research on underwater carbon dioxide pipeline failures. A report by the Center for International Environmental Law said such infrastructure could incur seawater infiltration during construction, potentially weakening the metal, and cited high leakage rates of oil and gas pipelines off the coasts of Texas and Louisiana.
Levine said the Montezuma project will have a fiber optic monitoring system covering the length of the proposed pipeline, with monitors every 6 feet and automatic shut-off valves that would engage if a leak was detected.
“It will be the safest [carbon dioxide] pipeline in the world,” Levine said.
