Oil Company’s Plan Threatens Community Health, Climate Goals

November 24, 2024 - BUTTONWILLOW, Calif.— A coalition of community, environmental justice and conservation groups sued Kern County last Wednesday for approving the Carbon TerraVault I project. The groups cite multiple environmental, public health and safety concerns that Kern County failed to address before its board of supervisors approved the project’s final environmental impact report in October.

Carbon TerraVault I is the first carbon capture and storage, or CCS, project of its kind in California. Proposed by California Resources Corporation, or CRC, the state’s largest oil and gas company, the project would capture and inject 49 million metric tons of carbon dioxide to store underground at CRC's Elk Hills oil and gas field near Bakersfield.

The project will add new CCS equipment to the existing methane gas processing plant and power plant supporting the Elk Hills field, build 11 miles of new pipelines to transport captured CO2, and inject it underground via multiple high-pressure injection wells.

Because the CO2 captured from existing operations at Elk Hills will only account for about 10% of the project’s storage capacity, Kern County and CRC have also opened the door to a range of new polluting facilities that could be built from scratch to send CO2 to TerraVault I. This massive buildout, including hydrogen, cement, steel and gasoline facilities, flies in the face of the purported purpose of CCS projects, which is to meaningfully reduce greenhouse gas emissions and address climate change. It will also increase the pollution burden for local communities in Kern County.

“Kern County has bought into the misleading claim that this project will reduce climate impacts, opening the door to significant federal and state financial subsidies for CCS,” said Michelle Ghafar, an attorney at Earthjustice. “This is exactly the type of ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing’ diversion by the oil and gas industry that Californians must oppose if we want to make real climate progress. We must invest in renewable energy, not false solutions hawked by the source of the problem.”

Kern County’s analysis reveals that TerraVault I cannot satisfy the most important expectation for all CCS projects: to permanently and safely store CO2 underground. The Elk Hills field is covered with thousands of previously drilled oil and gas wells that increase the risk of dangerous carbon leaks, and the county admitted shortly before approval that it cannot ensure permanent CO2 storage.

The lawsuit challenges Kern County’s approval of the Carbon TerraVault I project under the California Environmental Quality Act. During the environmental report drafting process, the county received thousands of public comments urging it to address the deficiencies in its analysis and reject the project in its current form. Many of these comments were from residents living in communities surrounding the Elk Hills project site. The majority of people in these frontline communities are low-income and people of color who are already disproportionately harmed by the highest pollution burdens in California.

“Every day, Kern communities are forced to face the effects of being one of the most polluted regions in the country,” said Diana Mireles, the president of Comité Progreso de Lamont. “Now, the county has approved this carbon capture and storage facility, completely ignoring our concerns about increasing the lifespan of polluting infrastructure and attracting more carbon-emitting projects with their own impacts. We deserve better than a government that only answers to the oil industry. We won’t accept this; so, we’re fighting back.”

Because TerraVault will have long-term consequences for Kern County and the entire state, the county must fully analyze and mitigate its wide array of potential impacts and carefully consider any project alternatives as required by law, as today’s lawsuit notes.

Yet the county’s final environmental impact report is riddled with errors and repeated attempts to pass off its environmental review obligations elsewhere. The report fails to address significant and unavoidable project impacts to air quality, greenhouse gases, energy use, local geology, pipeline safety, water supply and biological resources in the area. It also ignores impacts from the project’s numerous potential carbon sources and fails to consider alternatives to the project that are less environmentally harmful.

“CRC is presenting Carbon TerraVault I as a ‘climate solution,’ but it's really a trojan horse — one filled with dangerous, high-pressure pipelines and unacceptable pollution risks for communities already bearing California's heaviest air quality burden,” said Mercedes Aguilar, a senior organizer with the Sierra Club living in Kern County. “Rather than investing millions in this risky project, which will primarily serve to extend the life of fossil fuel operations, CRC should focus on addressing their existing environmental obligations — including the proper cleanup and closure of their approximately 12,000 idle wells in Kern County.”

“Kern County has rubberstamped the biggest corporate deception since filtered cigarettes,” said Victoria Bogdan Tejeda, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute. “By claiming to help the climate, California's largest oil and gas company can benefit from state and federal incentives and subsidies. Projects that disguise fossil fuels as a climate solution warrant close scrutiny and ultimately should not be approved.”

CRC is planning a major expansion of CCS projects across California. TerraVault I is the first of six underground CO2 storage “vaults” the company is proposing in the San Joaquin and Sacramento basins.

A broad coalition of groups concerned about TerraVault I’s serious risks and harms filed the lawsuit. Earthjustice is representing Central California Environmental Justice Network and Sierra Club, Center for Biological Diversity is representing itself, and Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment is representing Committee for a Better Shafter, Delano Guardians, and Comité Progreso de Lamont.

The Center for Biological Diversity is a national, nonprofit conservation organization with more than 1.7 million members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered species and wild places.
Source: Center for Biological Diversity