TX Opens Millions Of Offshore Acres For CO2 "Sequestration". Yay. We're Saved.
Texas has opened more than a million acres of offshore, state-owned waters for proposals from companies to inject greenhouse gas underground for permanent disposal as a means to mitigate climate change. The request for proposals issued in June by Texas’ General Land Office was its fourth since 2021 and its largest by far, opening waters in Lavaca Bay, Matagorda Bay and far southern Laguna Madre, as well as offshore from South Padre Island, Matagorda Island, Freeport and the Bolivar Peninsula.
So-called “carbon sequestration” forms an emerging pillar of U.S. climate policy. With support from the oil and gas sector, it is poised for rapid expansion, thanks to federal funding. It involves capturing carbon dioxide at industrial smokestacks, piping it to wellheads and pumping it underground instead of releasing it into the air.
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The practice remains expensive and technically challenging, and there are few commercial-scale examples in operation despite decades of support for the technology. Many environmentalists have warned that carbon sequestration could fail to meaningfully reduce greenhouse gases warming the planet while prolonging demand for fossil fuels.
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He and other industry leaders foresee the Gulf Coast becoming a global hub for carbon disposal, thanks to three factors: favorable geology, proximity to industrial emissions and the simplicity of working on state-owned land. All that’s missing is a revenue model. “It’s largely on the back of government subsidies. In the long term, that’s not a sustainable solution,” McConnell said. “We’re going to spend a lot of money to reduce emissions, and we do not have a market construct in this country that supports it.”
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ED. - Emphasis added. Oh, and IOW, there's no reason on earth that companies would do this, because they can't make money doing it, but we'll flog the dog of "carbon sequestration" on the tee-vee so that we'll have a low-cost approach to looking like we're doing something.