WildEarth Guardians Urges Colorado to Focus on Lowering Emissions on the Heels of New Carbon Storage Rules

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DENVER – Today, Colorado’s Energy and Carbon Management Commission (ECMC) set the state’s first rules on how captured carbon dioxide (either from industrial sources or direct air capture) will be stored permanently in deep underground wells in a process known as “carbon capture and sequestration,” or CCS.

“We’re happy that Colorado has created rules for carbon storage which emphasize the need to avoid putting additional burdens on disproportionately impacted communities, but we’re disappointed that while they included some protections for communities, they didn’t go far enough,” said Kate Merlin, Staff Attorney at WildEarth Guardians. “Now that these rules are in place, we hope that the state will return its focus to the emissions reductions which are even more badly needed. The oil and gas industry is still one of our state’s largest polluters, before you even consider the CO2 emissions caused by the use of those fuels. If we don’t bring down emissions, trying to recapture and store them will be like spitting in the ocean.”

The carbon dioxide (CO2) will be pressurized and injected underground through special wells called Class VI wells. The rulemaking was held because Colorado wishes to regulate itself rather than rely on permits from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and passed Colorado Senate Bill 23-16, which authorized the ECMC to seek authority to issue the permits itself. The only other states that currently issue their own Class VI well permits are Wyoming, North Dakota, and Louisiana.

WildEarth Guardians has been a party in the rulemaking, seeking to strengthen the rules to ensure the CO2 storage was permanent and to better protect disproportionately impacted communities. The majority of the facilities that the state has identified as having capturable CO2 emissions are near population centers, including many severely disproportionately impacted communities in Denver, Colorado Springs, and Pueblo.

During the rulemaking the rules changed from what was originally proposed. Significant changes included clarifying language that these wells are intended to store CO2 permanently, and cannot be used for temporary CO2 storage, nor can oil or gas be produced as a result. These protections are crucial to ensure that these new storage facilities don’t lead to more enhanced oil production, which is a process that can use CO2 to pull out the last drops of oil which had been trapped in old wells. This language clarifies that carbon storage facilities cannot be used for temporary storage of CO2, even if it would be profitable in the future to remove it for use somewhere else.

Another change to the rules was removing language that would have allowed economic benefits to outweigh harm to public health and the environment in disproportionately impacted communities. Without the rule change, communities that are already heavily burdened by polluting industrial facilities might have had additional industrial facilities proposed for their neighborhoods without “avoiding, minimizing, and mitigating” public health and environmental impacts. This is important because under Colorado law, Class VI well proposals that have cumulative net negative impacts on disproportionately impacted communities cannot be approved.

“To preserve the stable climate for future generations, we must act extremely quickly to bring CO2 levels down – but our emissions are still moving in the wrong direction,” Merlin added. “Carbon capture and sequestration can be a part of the climate solution, but the amount of CO2 we can potentially capture and store is just a small fraction of what we continue to emit.”