Karen Feridun
1,000 signatures reached
To: PA Legislature, Governor Josh Shapiro
Stop Carbon Capture and Storage from Coming to Pennsylvania
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Senator Yaw’s Carbon Capture and Storage bill, SB 831, is a profoundly consequential piece of legislation whose adverse impacts cannot be overstated. Governor Shapiro should not have signed it into law. Now the legislature must repeal it.
Declaring a nonexistent technology to be in the public interest defies logic, yet that is what SB 831 does. Billions of dollars have been spent on Carbon Capture and Storage demonstration projects since the Obama administration. None has succeeded.
Carbon Capture has been used for Enhanced Oil Recovery for decades. Storing CO2 was never the objective. As we have cited in our statements to you and the legislature, Stephen Rassenfoss wrote in the Journal of Petroleum Engineering that “While a lot has been learned from EOR (enhanced oil recovery), there may well be significant differences between cycling just enough gas through a reservoir to increase production and injecting as much gas as possible for permanent storage, often in unfamiliar sorts of formations.” (emphasis added)
The bill strips Pennsylvania landowners of their subsurface property rights, shifts liability to the state, and exposes everyone to a new and very dangerous generation of fossil fuel infrastructure. Senator Yaw calls the bill “a proactive step to secure Pennsylvania’s future as a hub for carbon capture and sequestration.” How can such extreme measures taken to the detriment of the people be considered a proactive step for anyone but the parties that will profit from it?
The bill never had a hearing, nor was it referred to the House Environmental Resources and Energy committee. Instead, it was moved quickly through both the Consumer Protection and Appropriations committees without discussion. Representative Matzie attempted to school his colleagues during the floor debate. He misrepresented Senator Yaw’s description of the bill by framing it instead as a way to ensure that the state has control over a technology whose coming is an inevitability.
A state that is taking control does not violate landowners’ property rights, nor burden taxpayers with liability, nor expose communities to dangerous fossil fuel infrastructure, nor put this massive responsibility on an already overburdened regulatory agency with a history of failing to protect the environment and Pennsylvanians from this industry. Carbon Capture and Storage is only unavoidable if our government lacks the courage to avoid it.
SB 831 should not have been enacted for the sake of the Commonwealth and the people who depend on you to make the courageous choice to protect them.
Why is this important?
Minutes after we started this petition yesterday afternoon, Governor Shapiro signed the bill. Now it is up to the legislature to repeal it.
Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is an unproven technology that has never worked. Naomi Oreskes, best known as the co-author of Merchants of Doubt, wrote in an essay in Scientific American in March that she is among geologists who believe that long term CO2 storage could be achieved, but that its success relies on identifying sites where CO2 will remain sequestered. “But site characterization takes time that we don't have,” she says. She points out that billions were spent over two decades to evaluate Yucca Mountain as a site for nuclear waste disposal before the proposal failed. Identifying sequestration sites is just as challenging.
For years, we were told that Pennsylvania's geology was not suited to injection wells, the wells used for underground storage. Our geology hasn't changed, yet we've seen a huge increase in injection well projects, most of them Class II wells used for oil & gas waste. CCS requires its own class of well the EPA calls Class VI injection wells. Identifying sites for those wells is particularly challenging in Pennsylvania, not just because of our geology, but because the CCS involves injecting CO2 into pore space below a cap rock, or the impermeable rock, that will keep CO2 from leaking. The Marcellus would be the likely cap rock, but its integrity is in question because of decades of drilling and fracking and because there are hundreds of thousands of abandoned wells in the Marcellus. Does that disqualify the Marcellus from being a suitable cap rock? Does the corrosive effect of the CO2 compromise the cap rock? What does permanent, as in permanent sequestration, mean?
Scientists are still trying to answer these questions and many others. If scientists don't know the answers, our state legislators don't know them either. That didn't stop them from passing the bill without any hearings or discussion and without referring it to the House Environmental Resources and Energy Committee.
The scientific and technological unknowns are concerning enough, but Yaw's bill takes aim at the public by imposing a form of subsurface eminent domain that bars people from saying no to injection into their pore space if enough neighbors say yes. It then shifts liability from the industry to the state so the taxpayers are left holding the bag when something goes wrong. And it exposes communities to dangerous Class VI wells and the CO2 pipelines that would deliver the CO2 to the site.
The only ones who benefit from SB 831 are those who will profit from using PA as a CO2 waste dump. The rest of us have everything to lose. CCS is one of the false climate solutions that allows the fossil fuel industry to continue doing business as usual, but it's also the technology that turns gray hydrogen blue. The blue hydrogen hubs proposed for Pennsylvania use methane as a feedstock to produce the hydrogen. That means more drilling and fracking, more harms to our communities, and more climate-killing methane leaks.
Governor Shapiro failed to protect Pennsylvania. It's up to the legislature now.
Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is an unproven technology that has never worked. Naomi Oreskes, best known as the co-author of Merchants of Doubt, wrote in an essay in Scientific American in March that she is among geologists who believe that long term CO2 storage could be achieved, but that its success relies on identifying sites where CO2 will remain sequestered. “But site characterization takes time that we don't have,” she says. She points out that billions were spent over two decades to evaluate Yucca Mountain as a site for nuclear waste disposal before the proposal failed. Identifying sequestration sites is just as challenging.
For years, we were told that Pennsylvania's geology was not suited to injection wells, the wells used for underground storage. Our geology hasn't changed, yet we've seen a huge increase in injection well projects, most of them Class II wells used for oil & gas waste. CCS requires its own class of well the EPA calls Class VI injection wells. Identifying sites for those wells is particularly challenging in Pennsylvania, not just because of our geology, but because the CCS involves injecting CO2 into pore space below a cap rock, or the impermeable rock, that will keep CO2 from leaking. The Marcellus would be the likely cap rock, but its integrity is in question because of decades of drilling and fracking and because there are hundreds of thousands of abandoned wells in the Marcellus. Does that disqualify the Marcellus from being a suitable cap rock? Does the corrosive effect of the CO2 compromise the cap rock? What does permanent, as in permanent sequestration, mean?
Scientists are still trying to answer these questions and many others. If scientists don't know the answers, our state legislators don't know them either. That didn't stop them from passing the bill without any hearings or discussion and without referring it to the House Environmental Resources and Energy Committee.
The scientific and technological unknowns are concerning enough, but Yaw's bill takes aim at the public by imposing a form of subsurface eminent domain that bars people from saying no to injection into their pore space if enough neighbors say yes. It then shifts liability from the industry to the state so the taxpayers are left holding the bag when something goes wrong. And it exposes communities to dangerous Class VI wells and the CO2 pipelines that would deliver the CO2 to the site.
The only ones who benefit from SB 831 are those who will profit from using PA as a CO2 waste dump. The rest of us have everything to lose. CCS is one of the false climate solutions that allows the fossil fuel industry to continue doing business as usual, but it's also the technology that turns gray hydrogen blue. The blue hydrogen hubs proposed for Pennsylvania use methane as a feedstock to produce the hydrogen. That means more drilling and fracking, more harms to our communities, and more climate-killing methane leaks.
Governor Shapiro failed to protect Pennsylvania. It's up to the legislature now.