In deep geologic formations beneath a ranch between Lake Charles and the Sabine River, a company called Gulf Coast Sequestration wants to permanently store more than 80 million tons of carbon gas emitted by Louisiana’s industrial plants.
The Lake Charles firm announced over the weekend has begun the process for obtaining a Class VI Underground Injection Control permit from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. to that end, it has filed a detailed technical submission to delineate its “area of review.”
Once completed, the GCS “hub” is expected to be the largest geologic carbon capture sequestration project in the U.S. and one of the largest in the world, according to the announcement. With the capacity to sequester 2.7 million tons of CO₂ annually, it will be equivalent to removing about 600,000 passenger vehicles from the road every year or the equivalent annual carbon avoided from 2,000 wind turbines.
Located in close proximity to one of the nation’s busiest industrial corridors, GCS will partner with industrial customers to capture CO₂ and safely contain it underground. In recent years, technological developments and new federal tax credits have made it economically attractive for some industrial facilities to install CCS systems to dramatically reduce their CO₂ emissions.
The filing marks a milestone for GCS, which controls both the surface and subsurface rights for a large, contiguous landholding in southwest Louisiana. The permit application comes after years of comprehensive data collection and analysis that determined that the area’s geologic pore space is ideally suited to build and operate the project.
“This filing is a long time coming and an exciting moment for GCS,” said Gray Stream, president of Matilda Stream Management Inc., which owns GCS, in making the announcement. “We have done our homework, and our permit application reflects our commitment to robust environmental compliance.”
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that the costs of tackling climate change could more than double if CCS technology is not developed and widely deployed. The GCS project capitalizes on CCS’s vital—and singular—capability for reducing the emissions from existing industrial facilities.
The team behind GCS includes several of the world’s leading experts on carbon capture and sequestration who bring insight and experience on geology, petrophysics, seismic, and reservoir modeling and simulation as well as the complex legal and regulatory issues involved with a project of this size and scale.
“At GCS, we believe that CCS is the best way to tackle industrial greenhouse gas emissions,” said GCS principal Benjamin Heard. “By providing safe and secure storage for carbon dioxide, GCS will assist industrial customers in achieving their sustainability goals. Working together, we can help to steer the United States toward a more economically and environmentally sustainable future.”
