Click play to listen to this article.

Oil and gas companies are planning for large carbon capture and storage hubs in the Gulf of Mexico, just off the Texas coast.

A report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis showed Exxon Mobil, Chevron and Repsol plan to use 2,400 square miles of subsea land to store carbon dioxide.

Anika Juhn, energy data analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis and the report's author, said the plan is unprecedented and companies are ignoring potential risks.

Image

"Moving around captured CO2 through pipelines, sending it out to injection wells in offshore areas, and then injecting it thousands of feet underground," Juhn outlined. "They’re many times larger than any of the existing carbon injection activities."

Juhn pointed out the companies are using the 45Q federal subsidy to fund the projects, which incentivizes carbon capture and sequestration. The CO2 would be stored off the coast in Houston, Corpus Christi and the Beaumont-Port Arthur area.

The companies claim the projects will allow them to store up to 140 million metric tons of CO2 per year but Juhn countered efforts of this size have not been tested or commercialized anywhere in the world, either on land or at sea.

"The math just doesn’t add up," Juhn contended. "These projects are so energy-intensive and require fossil fuels to do a lot of this work that the math just doesn’t work out in meaningful reductions in CO2 emissions."

She added carbon capture is useful in reducing emissions but the process is very expensive and there is no guarantee the large-scale underwater projects will work.

"It’s a lot of infrastructure. There are a lot of really complicated components from a technological standpoint," Juhn stressed. "But these massive carbon storage projects are uneconomic without federal subsidies and projects like these will cost taxpayers billions of dollars."