The Montezuma Wetlands drape throughout 1,800 acres of Solano County, California, the place the Sacramento River empties into San Francisco Bay. As soon as drained and diked for farming and grazing, the marsh has been rehabilitated over the previous twenty years, and in 2020, tidal waters returned for the primary time in a century. Immediately, the land teems with shorebirds, waterfowl, and different wildlife in a uncommon instance of large-scale habitat restoration.
However simply because the ecosystem is on the mend, one other makeover could also be coming. An organization known as Montezuma Carbon needs to ship hundreds of thousands of tons of carbon dioxide from Bay Space polluters by means of a 40-mile pipeline and retailer it in saline aquifers 2 miles beneath the wetland. Approval might are available as little as 12 to 18 months as soon as the county approves a check properly, with what its backers name “restricted disposal” coming one 12 months after that. If the mission proceeds, it could possibly be the Golden State’s first large-scale, climate-driven carbon seize and storage website. Final 12 months, the Environmental Safety Company permitted Carbon TerraVault, a smaller mission in Kern County, California, that may retailer carbon dioxide in depleted oil wells.
Proponents say the realm’s geology and proximity to regional industries make it a perfect place to stash carbon, and the corporate notes its amenities shall be “properly away from the restored wetland areas and much from delicate habitats.” Residents and environmental justice teams argue that the mission is being steered towards a low-income, working-class county lengthy burdened with industrial improvement, they usually fear about security, ecological disruption, and whether or not the know-how is a distraction from simpler and reasonably priced local weather options. Their battle over threat, consent, and who should dwell with local weather infrastructure will assist outline not simply the way forward for this mission, however how California decides who bears the prices of decarbonization.
Lengthy earlier than turning into a showpiece of ecological restoration, the wetland in query was handled as expendable. Starting within the late nineteenth century, the Montezuma Wetlands have been remodeled into farmland and shielded from pure tidal flows. By the tip of the twentieth century, a lot of the realm functioned much less as a marsh and extra as a repository for industrial waste.
That started to vary within the early 2000s, when College of California, Berkeley professor and environmental scientist Jim Levine led a remediation effort that used sediment dredged from the Port of Oakland to revive the wetland. The mission was praised by regulators and conservationists and reestablished tidal habitat, altering the trajectory of a panorama lengthy outlined by extraction.
Levine’s involvement with the location developed, finally inserting the Montezuma Wetlands on the heart of a vastly totally different environmental experiment. Round 2010, scientists with Shell and the Lawrence Berkeley Nationwide Laboratory recognized the realm’s shale composition as probably appropriate for storing massive quantities of carbon dioxide. As California’s local weather targets grew extra bold, Levine started selling the location as a spot the place these geological circumstances might assist a large-scale carbon seize and storage mission.
In Might 2023, Montezuma Carbon sought an EPA allow to inject CO2, sourced from refineries, hydrogen vegetation, and energy vegetation, into the Montezuma Wetlands. The mission, designed by scientists with the Lawrence Berkeley lab, Stanford College, and UC-Berkeley, stalled final spring as Levine’s well being declined. After his demise in September, its technical lead, seismologist and Berkeley professor Jamie Rector, wished to “do proper by Jim” and reignite the proposal, positioning it as each a local weather answer and a research-driven check case — at the same time as scrutiny and opposition have intensified.
“Solano County traditionally has lengthy been handled as a waste dump for the area’s polluters,” mentioned native pediatrician Bonnie Hamilton. “We have now a wonderful space and don’t wish to see it tousled for the sake of wealthy folks eager to get richer.”
Opponents body Montezuma Carbon’s proposal as a query of who controls their land and who absorbs the dangers of decarbonization. The county is dwelling to roughly half one million folks, together with the Bay Space’s largest per capita populations of veterans and residents with disabilities, and it’s among the many most racially numerous counties within the nation. Restricted sources could make navigating regulatory and authorized processes tough, heightening considerations about significant consent. These worries are compounded by a historical past of business violations, together with an $82 million penalty levied final 12 months in opposition to the Valero refinery in Benicia for years of unreported poisonous emissions and different air high quality failures.
Inside the subsequent three years, the mission’s architects hope to be depositing as much as 8 million tons of carbon yearly, a major stride towards the state’s objective of capturing 13 to twenty million tons by 2030. Rector believes the location might retailer no less than 100 million tons over its 40-year lifespan. The positioning’s compacted mud, silt, and clay, he mentioned, would offer a pure cap that would maintain the pollutant locked underground indefinitely, whereas its location alongside Bay Space industries would scale back carbon transportation prices.
Daniel Sannum Lauten / AFP through Getty Photographs
The Nationwide Power Expertise Laboratory, which leads the Power Division’s analysis on carbon seize and storage, factors to key benefits of the location like minimal environmental sensitivity and low inhabitants density. The closest group, Rio Vista, is 10 miles away. Rector added that superior pipeline monitoring programs, corresponding to acoustic, strain, and temperature sensors, can shortly detect and comprise leaks. In contrast to enhanced oil restoration — the place pressurized CO2 is injected to extract oil, with rules aimed primarily at defending groundwater — EPA guidelines for climate-driven sequestration require operators to display that injected carbon will stay buried. The mission’s proponents additionally argue that a long time of expertise pumping carbon underground — together with greater than a billion tons injected within the U.S. for industrial use, corresponding to for beverage carbonation, because the Seventies, and over 20 million tons which have been safely saved at Norway’s Sleipner mission since 1996 — recommend that Montezuma is a low-risk website.
Pipeline security has drawn heightened scrutiny since 2020, when a carbon dioxide pipeline ruptured in Satartia, Mississippi, casting a dense cloud of fuel close to the bottom and hospitalizing dozens of residents. Though that pipeline was federally regulated, critics and regulators alike later acknowledged these guidelines have been insufficient for managing the general public security dangers of large-scale CO2 transport.
Rector quipped that the mission would leak “when pigs fly,” however recognized pressure-induced seismicity because the principal peril, given the wetlands’ place between the Kirby Hills and Midland faults — although the Nationwide Power Expertise Laboratory has mentioned a devastating occasion is unlikely. To scale back that threat, Rector has proposed drawing down water from a close-by reservoir to ease subsurface strain and create extra capability for injected fuel, with the water probably redirected to farmers and industries going through continual shortages.
Carbon seize and storage is extensively seen by policymakers, trade leaders, and lots of scientists as a vital — if imperfect — device for assembly state local weather targets, at the same time as environmentalists argue it diverts consideration from cheaper, cleaner options. California Governor Gavin Newsom has mentioned “there isn’t a path” to carbon neutrality with out the know-how, a degree the California Air Assets Board echoed when it informed Grist it “couldn’t weigh in on particular tasks, however carbon administration is a essential piece of the state’s plan to realize carbon neutrality by 2045.” This institutional assist is mirrored in laws like SB 614, which stresses the know-how is central to California’s effort to succeed in net-zero emissions.
Supporters argue that the worth of carbon seize is most blatant in sectors the place greenhouse gases are hardest to curb, corresponding to cement manufacturing, which accounts for roughly 8 p.c of world CO2 output. Whereas lower-carbon supplies and cleaner manufacturing methods are rising, they are going to be expensive and sluggish to deploy at scale. Even with these adjustments, substantial emissions would stay, mentioned Ben Grove, a deputy director on the Clear Air Activity Power, main him to contemplate carbon seize a vital complement to different local weather options.
For Montezuma Carbon, that high-level backing has but to translate into monetary certainty. Undertaking leaders say technological advances that would decrease prices, together with authorities incentives and personal funding, are nonetheless important.
Nonetheless, the corporate faces vital hurdles, together with regulatory approval and the lack of its founder. Value is now the “albatross round our neck,” Rector mentioned, because the mission has no financing and is estimated to require roughly $2 billion. The Division of Power denied a $340 million grant in 2023, and Rector acknowledged that with out authorities subsidies or a promising return for traders, funding shall be tough.
In its EPA software, Montezuma Carbon contends the mission would carry jobs, tax income, cleaner air, and a hub for local weather innovation to “deprived native communities.” Residents and native environmental justice advocates don’t purchase it. In addition they argue the know-how will solely perpetuate the usage of fossil fuels. The Worldwide Institute for Sustainable Growth considers carbon seize and storage “costly, power intensive, unproven at scale, and has no impression on the 80 p.c of oil and fuel emissions that consequence from downstream use.” Related carbon pipeline schemes have failed within the Midwest due to group opposition, and Montezuma Carbon is only one of a dozen such tasks into consideration in California.
Tom Kunhardt, Communities Towards Carbon Transport and Injection
Native officers are reviewing California’s first geological carbon storage mission, in Kern County, as they attempt to perceive how related proposals have been evaluated elsewhere. County Supervisor Cassanda James “doesn’t have a remark presently,” in keeping with her chief of workers, and different county supervisors didn’t reply to requests for remark. Alma Hernandez, the mayor of Suisun Metropolis, which is about 20 miles from the proposed website, mentioned her workers is “nonetheless studying extra” in regards to the mission and “no place has been taken.”
For a lot of residents, the unanswered questions go deeper than allowing or precedent. They ask whether or not industries labeled “important” should proceed emitting carbon dioxide in any respect, or whether or not cleaner alternate options might negate the necessity for applied sciences like underground storage. And so they query who will get to resolve which communities ought to host infrastructure designed to handle the results of air pollution generated elsewhere. “All of us wish to consider the local weather disaster could possibly be solved with out altering how society capabilities,” Theo LeQuesne of the Middle for Organic Variety mentioned.
The Montezuma Wetlands have endured centuries of human interference, first in its destruction after which its restoration. It now faces one other potential refashioning to handle emissions from an economic system that also rests solidly on fossil fuels.
On the coronary heart of the talk shouldn’t be solely whether or not carbon seize is an efficient solution to meet California’s local weather targets, however the place such infrastructure ought to be constructed, and who will get to resolve. The destiny of the mission hinges on the burden of statewide local weather ambitions, scientific confidence within the know-how, and the objections of the group being requested to host it.
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