Carbon Capture Means More Pollution for Black Communities in Cancer Alley

Rosemary Green and her husband live mere feet away from a massive chemical storage depot that hugs the Mississippi River just west of New Orleans. Over 200 tanks of the International-Matex Tank Terminals (IMTT) hulk beside their modest home on Fourth Street in the historic Black community of Elkinsville in St. Rose. Green and her neighbors have been complaining about the plant’s fumes and periodic tank fires for years.

“I woke up in the middle of the night choking,” she shared at a public meeting this June. “I’m trying to catch my breath. My throat was burning. My eyes were burning.”

Now she worries about a new threat on her fence line, this one emanating from a technology touted for its supposed environmental benefits: A company called St. Charles Clean Fuels announced plans in 2023 to build a $4.6 billion “blue ammonia” plant on 200 acres of swampland behind the IMTT plant. “Blue” is a marketing term for products that are considered “low-carbon” — not because they are produced by clean energy but because they plan to use carbon capture and storage (CCS).

CCS refers to the process of capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) from polluting power plants, industrial sources or directly from the air, and then transporting it to sites where it can be buried. St. Charles Clean Fuels claims it will capture 99 percent of all CO2 emitted from ammonia production. The CO2 will be transported to a remote sequestration site via pipeline. The low-carbon ammonia would be loaded onto ships and exported to meet growing global demand for low-carbon fuels and fertilizer.

Supporters argue that CCS is essential for mitigating CO2 emissions, especially from “hard to abate” industrial sectors like petrochemicals. Critics, however, argue that it is a costly and untested way to prolong the life of fossil fuels. For Green and other Elkinsville residents, CCS just means another chemical plant on their fence line, with one difference: This one will be subsidized by the Biden Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), widely heralded by liberal climate advocates as the U.S.’s “historic” climate legislation.

The 2022 IRA doubled the tax break — called 45Q — for each ton of CO2 permanently sequestered. This has unleashed a CCS boom, with over 100 projects proposed across the country. The vast majority are being developed by fossil fuel companies. Louisiana — with its existing fossil fuel infrastructure and ideal geology — has more proposed CCS projects than any state in the country.

While CCS may or may not help in the fight against climate change, the case of Elkinsville illustrates how it is replicating the environmental injustices that the fossil fuel industry has heaped upon Black communities for generations. The community sits within the 85 mile-long petrochemical corridor along the Mississippi River known as “Cancer Alley.” It was founded in the 1870s as a “freetown” where emancipated Black people could acquire land after the abandonment of Reconstruction. A chemical storage company bought the plantation next door in the 1930s and expanded over time. Today, the community ranks in the 95th percentile for respiratory risk due to pollution. As the retired general and environmental justice advocate Russel Honore said at a recent community meeting, “I don’t know a bigger fenceline community in the world. You can throw a baseball and hit the IMTT tanks.”

What most concerns Elkinsville residents is what CCS won’t capture: all the other pollutants generated from ammonia production. According to its air permit application, St. Charles Clean Fuels would release ammonia, nitrogen oxide, carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds, sulfur dioxide and particulate matter.

Many residents feel they can’t take any more. On June 1, residents packed the local American Legion hall to hear opposing perspectives on the new plant from company executives and environmental justice advocates. The IMTT Chairman and CEO Carlin Conner acknowledged “some odor issues at the facility,” before touting the company’s diversification into clean fuels and its community investments, including vocational training. St. Charles Clean Fuels CEO Ramesh Raman described blue ammonia’s role in the nation’s energy transition and the project’s various safety redundancies. He also claimed the project would create 200 permanent jobs with average salaries around $80,000. Both companies have teamed up to form a charitable outreach arm in the community.

Residents scoffed. They shared harrowing stories about health issues — headaches, nausea, throat irritation — caused by the existing tank farm. Pointing to the community’s cancer deaths, Green told the American Legion hall audience that the new plant, “may offer jobs, but that doesn’t bring back a life. I don’t care how much money you offer. It’s never going to bring back their loved ones.”

Kimbrelle Kyereh, a resident and teacher organizing against the plant, also worried about a more immediate risk: disaster. She pointed to the explosion of a CO2 pipeline in Satartia, Mississippi, that hospitalized 45 people. What would prevent that from happening here, she asked?

Elkinsville and neighboring communities of St. Rose continue to fight the plant, which has yet to receive any of its permits. Over the past year, Refined Community Empowerment — the organization started by Kyereh — has organized a series of community meetings, each one bigger than the last. So many residents showed up at a September 26 hearing on the project’s air permit that it was shut down by the fire marshal and rescheduled. St. Rose is now the epicenter of opposition to the CCS-enabled petrochemical buildout in Louisiana.

But St. Rose is not a unique case. If you combined the population living within a two-mile radius of the five proposed ammonia plants along the Mississippi petrochemical corridor, 50 percent are Black (compared to 22 percent of the total population in those parishes). Collectively, these residents are already in the 86th percentile nationally in exposure to toxic air emissions.

If these plants go forward, they will further embed and expand the already stark racial injustices of the petrochemical industry. It is a sad irony that this is being done in the name of fighting climate change, with subsidies from the United States’s historic climate law and the full support of an administration that proclaims its commitment to environmental justice.