Greenhouse Gas Storage Project Planned for Louisiana

A Louisiana company plans to create a deep underground repository to store up to 80 million tons of carbon gas now released into the air by state industrial plants, a “carbon sequestration” project aimed at helping reduce greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere that contribute to carbon change.

The Times-Picayune’s The New Orleans Advocate reports that the gas would be stored 10,000 feet deep in a permeable layer of rock beneath a cattle ranch owned by Gulf Coast Sequestration LLC between the Sabine River and Lake Charles.

Carbon gas would be shipped to the company and then pumped underground.

The company has begun work to get a permit from the Environmental Protection Agency to operate the underground injection facility, a process that could take a year or more.

“The permit application comes after years of comprehensive data collection and analysis which determined that the area’s geologic pore space is ideally suited to build and operate a world-class carbon sequestration project,” the company said in a recent news release. The release said the company believes the project will be “the largest geologic carbon capture sequestration project in the U.S. and one of the largest in the world.”

In August, Gov. John Bel Edwards launched a program aimed at reducing the state’s greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 28% by 2025. He also set a “net zero” emissions goal by 2050.