The Lever - The Rise Of Big Oil’s Zombie Pipelines

While leaks from carbon dioxide pipelines have sent people to the hospital with “zombie”-like conditions, fossil fuel companies aim to use new tax incentives to greatly expand such pipelines across the country as part of unproven carbon capture and storage efforts. As Emily Sanders reveals in today’s featured story, industry interests are also fighting to limit new regulations that could help protect communities in the pipelines’ path.

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A carbon dioxide pipeline rupture in the small village of Satartia, Mississippi, sent nearly 50 people to the hospital with “zombie”-like conditions in 2020, and now another major leak from a pipeline in Sulphur, Louisiana, has once again exposed the risks carbon dioxide pipelines pose to communities in their path. 

Soon, pipelines like this could be coming to cities and towns throughout the country. Spurred by federal tax incentives from the Biden Administration, the fossil fuel industry is planning to build tens of thousands of miles of carbon dioxide (CO2) pipelines across the United States for experimental carbon capture and storage — a process aimed at sequestering carbon emissions from power plants, sending it through pipelines, and injecting it underground. 

While regulators are working to craft updated safety rules for these pipelines, major fossil fuel companies and their trade groups — including Chevron, ConocoPhillips, the American Petroleum Institute, and the Liquid Energy Pipeline Association — have launched a lobbying blitz to scale back regulations and target the regulators themselves so they can construct new pipelines as quickly as possible.

Carbon dioxide is an asphyxiant. Upon entering the atmosphere during a pipeline leak or rupture, it can travel long distances, shut down vehicles, and sicken, suffocate, or even kill people and wildlife. 

Only about 5,000 miles of carbon dioxide pipelines currently exist across the country, largely operating in states across the Midwest and Gulf Coast. Many communities, landowners, and environmental and public health groups have staunchly opposed and, in some cases, successfully prevented their build-out, such as eliminating the proposed 1,300-mile Navigator pipeline that would have crossed through five Midwestern states.

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But now, this pipeline network could be greatly expanded. According to the U.S. Department of Energy and financial industry estimates, it could take up to 96,000 miles of new carbon dioxide pipelines — enough to wrap around the earth four times — to transport just 15 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, the federal agency tasked with pipeline safety, announced in 2022 that it would update rules for carbon dioxide pipelines. 

The agency, which is overseen by Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and was implicated in the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, is itself up for reauthorization, meaning Congress will reconsider its lawmaking mandates and funding. Now the pipeline industry, represented by its main lobbying group, the Liquid Energy Pipeline Association, is using both the rule-making and reauthorization processes to push its agenda forward.

“There is no need for adding a host of punitive provisions on the pipeline industry,” reads written January testimony from Andrew Black, the lobbying group’s president and CEO, to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has proposed a bill on the pipeline safety agency’s reauthorization. “The data just does not support those who wish to impose harsh new mandates or penalties on pipeline operators.”

On March 6, the Liquid Energy Pipeline Association arranged a meeting with the White House Office of Management and Budget, which is currently reviewing the draft carbon dioxide safety rules. Also present at the meeting were representatives from ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, Marathon, TC Energy, Kinder Morgan, Phillips 66, and Valero, along with representatives from the Department of Transportation.

“THE ADMINSTRATION [sic] SHOULD AVOID AN OVERLY BROAD OR UNSUBSTANTIATED CO2 PIPELINES RULEMAKING THAT RISKS DELAY AND IMPERILS FINALIZATION,” reads the all-caps intro to the lobbying group’s talking points for that meeting. 

In response to a request for comment, Liquid Energy Pipeline Association’s president and CEO Andy Black offered several reasons “why we think a measured approach to pipeline safety legislation is appropriate.” According to Black, federal data shows “the number of CO2 pipeline incidents is flat over the last 5 years,” and “Federal regulation imposes dozens of safety requirements on interstate CO2 pipelines on everything from design and construction to inspection, maintenance, and emergency response.”

Robin Rorick, one of the American Petroleum Institute's vice presidents, said in an email, “The safe use and development of CO2 pipelines will be critical as our industry and the nation as a whole advances its emissions reduction efforts. API will continue to work with [Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration] and industry experts to safely accelerate the widescale, responsible deployment of CO2 pipelines while protecting the environment and communities where we live and work.”

An Invisible Menace

The urgency of this issue reemerged this month after a carbon dioxide leak from a pipeline in Sulphur, Louisiana, co-owned by ExxonMobil and Denbury, a carbon capture developer that owns the country's largest carbon dioxide pipeline network.

Residents within a quarter mile of the leak received a phone notification to shelter in place. But others only received the news from a Facebook post by local officials, citing a “bust” in Exxon’s high-pressure carbon dioxide pipeline in Sulphur and warning residents to shut their doors and windows, turn off any ventilation, and wait.

While the proper procedure is to evacuate, local fire chief Todd Parker said changing winds near the leak made that impossible. “For the homes that were affected, they had to drive through the release to be able to get out, so we couldn’t evacuate them,” Parker explained. He said it took more than two hours for pipeline operators to stop the leak, which was called in by a resident who reported seeing “white clouds” coming from the pipeline.

In the meantime, Roishetta Ozane, a Sulphur resident and local environmental justice organizer, began fielding calls from panicked residents. 

“People were reaching out asking me about what CO2 is,” Ozane said. But as a mom of six children, she was also scared and confused. “We know that this is colorless and odorless, so I just kept my children inside and made sure they were OK,” said Ozane. “Pipelines leak, CO2 leaks, and you don’t know it’s happened until tragedy has struck.”

She remembered the incident in Satartia, where another Denbury carbon dioxide pipeline rupture caused mass asphyxiation, turning people into dazed and unresponsive “zombies,” with some losing consciousness. As hundreds rushed to evacuate, vehicles became paralyzed, since cars need oxygen to burn fuel. Some residents still face serious health issues years later.

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The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration slapped Denbury with the second-largest fine in its history after the Satartia disaster for neglecting to address hazards to its pipeline system and notify emergency responders of the leak or train them to address such an accident before it happened. 

The leak in Sulphur is “a very sobering introduction to how the companies will probably try to handle similar incidents,” said journalist Dan Zegart, who reported in depth on the Satartia disaster. “I say ‘similar incidents’ not even really knowing what [kind of leak] we’re talking about here, which is a perfect example of what we’re worried about in the future.” 

No injuries have been reported so far in Sulphur — regulators are still investigating the leak and the local municipality said it did not have records to provide — but the bewildering incident highlights the uncertain future for residents in the path of the carbon dioxide pipeline build-out. 

“It is alarming that we have been organizing, educating the community, educating ourselves, and trying to get answers from the government on [carbon capture and storage] in Louisiana for three years now, and we still did not have the information or frankly relationships necessary to get real-time information on what was happening [in Sulphur],” said Jane Patton, a campaign manager at the nonprofit advocacy group, the Center for International Environmental Law.

“[The Liquid Energy Pipeline Association] supports Congress mandating and [Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration] imposing new safety requirements on CO2 pipelines reflecting the lessons learned from the Satartia, MS pipeline incident,” said Black, the lobbying group’s president, in his email to The Lever. He added that the organization “looks forward to the results of Sulphur, LA pipeline incident review and any recommendations it produces for how to improve CO2 pipeline safety further.”

A Carbon Capture Future?

ExxonMobil — which purchased Denbury last year — is planning to build carbon capture infrastructure throughout Louisiana, where about a third of the nation’s carbon capture projects have been proposed. 

Exxon did not respond to requests for comment.

“We’ve got plans to grow our carbon capture business and really focus on emitters all along that Denbury pipeline,” Exxon CEO Darren Woods told Louisiana newspaper The Advocate in February. “What we’re doing is taking advantage of the ability to pump carbon dioxide back into the ground, and store it very safely. It’s isolated from the rest of the community.”

Patton says that such statements are just “another lie that we're being sold” by the fossil fuel industry. 

“Louisiana is magic, and I want to be able to pass this magic onto the next generation behind me,” she said. “We deserve a future here and that future is not in carbon capture.”

Scientists have been sounding the alarm that carbon capture and sequestration is not an effective way to reduce emissions and is most often used for enhanced oil recovery, which means accessing more fossil fuels to be burned. The Department of Energy just announced it would invest $23 million in two projects to evaluate the potential for enhanced oil recovery using captured carbon dioxide.

In internal company documents, the oil and gas industry has privately admitted that though CCS is “complex, costly, and will require additional power,” it will “enable the use of petroleum and natural gas” well into the future. 

But thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, which ratcheted up tax credits available for carbon capture technology, the race is on to build out carbon dioxide pipelines. 

Meanwhile, advocates say their concerns are being ignored. “You’ve got communities, NGOs on pipeline safety, governmental experts on pipeline safety all raising alarm about the hazards of what is being planned,” said Monique Harden, director of Law and Policy at the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice. “What you don’t have is the response of protection or response that validates those concerns. Instead, what you have is silence.”

Last week, U.S. Department of Energy Assistant Secretary Brad Crabtree told the Illinois newspaper The Springfield State-Journal Register, “I would argue that our electric transmission and distribution infrastructure, it’s essential to modern life, but it also results in injuries and fatalities… But as a result of those risks, we do not have people saying we shouldn’t have electric transmission and distribution… CO2 pipelines are no different in that regard.”

Many of the proposed pipeline projects would run through communities like Sulphur — low-income communities of color already burdened by polluting petrochemical and fossil fuel facilities. These communities often have minimal resources to respond to worsening extreme weather events, like a tornado that destroyed the office of Ozane’s disaster-relief and environmental justice nonprofit not far from Sulphur just days after the leak.

“On top of the fact that this is taking public money, it is essentially a program where the federal government pays the oil and gas industry to deal with its own waste product in a way that burdens communities and makes us demonstrably less safe,” said Patton. “Accidents that happen along CO2 pipeline routes are going to become more common and much more dangerous if this program is allowed to move forward.”

While significant public resources are being deployed to develop this technology, understanding of carbon dioxide pipeline leaks — how they happen, the extent of their damage, and how they should be addressed — lags far behind. 

“Often you need the knowledge gaps to be filled before you can fully fill the regulatory gaps,” said Bill Caram, executive director of Pipeline Safety Trust, an organization that advocates for stronger regulations on pipeline safety. “Right now, CO2 pipelines are relatively rare and relatively rural, and we’re moving toward building a lot more CO2 pipelines closer to communities. I don't think we are ready to do that safely.”

Current carbon dioxide pipelines are largely located in small communities with underpaid or volunteer fire departments, many of which lack equipment to respond to and monitor for carbon dioxide leaks. In Sulphur’s case, the fire chief said he had not seen an emergency response protocol from the company until after the leak occurred. 

Environmental and public health groups are pushing federal regulators for additional pipeline safety provisions, including updated “dispersion modeling” requirements, which show how carbon dioxide moves and would help emergency personnel respond to accidents, and adding odorants to the carbon dioxide to warn community members of a leak. 

Groups are also advocating for new limits on contaminants in the pipelines that can lead to corrosion; mandates for training and coordination between pipeline operators and first responders; and additional rules for transporting gaseous and liquid carbon dioxide, which are currently unregulated. 

Pipeline Pushback

But companies, and the lobbying groups that represent them, are pushing back. Since the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration announced its intention to make new rules on carbon dioxide pipelines in 2022, records show that Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Enbridge, Marathon, Shell, and Targa, along with trade associations like Liquid Energy Pipeline Association, American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, the American Petroleum Institute, have been lobbying the agency on pipeline infrastructure, rule-making, and safety, and/or lobbying on the agency’s reauthorization, among other issues.

During their March meeting at the White House Office of Management and Budget, fossil fuel interests appeared to push for rulemaking that prioritizes secrecy and expediency over safety and transparency.

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“Any emergency response requirements should ensure the protection of sensitive information and be aligned with industry current best practices,” reads API’s talking points from the meeting. “The rule must be technically feasible and set realistic timelines for implementation to ensure it supports rather than hinders the build-out of this additional CO2 pipeline infrastructure.”

Maggie Coulter, senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute, said advocacy groups are particularly concerned about the industry’s attempts to keep data about potential pipeline leaks hidden from the public. One of the bills being considered for Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration’s safety reauthorization, which has received broad support from industry trade groups, contains a provision for the “protection of sensitive information in responding to a public request for information regarding carbon dioxide dispersion modeling.” 

“There’s an additional cost in doing things safely, and increased public scrutiny when you’re affirmatively tasked with informing first responders and members of the public,” said Coulter. “Right now we just have to trust the company.”

Black, president of the Liquid Energy Pipeline Association, said in his comment to The Lever that his organization “supports operators sharing the results of pipeline modeling with state and local emergency planning officials and first responders,” but advocates for “limiting general public sharing of security sensitive information, as is the current approach for crude oil pipelines, to prevent bad actors from misusing this information to harm surrounding communities.”

Black did not respond directly to questions about evidence showing that pipeline operators have failed to communicate with first responders ahead of and properly respond to CO2 pipeline disasters in the past.

Caram of Pipeline Safety Trust said that given the risks that carbon dioxide pipelines pose to communities across the country, the companies involved shouldn’t be allowed to dictate their own safety standards.

“It's like the difference between a speed limit of 55 MPH as opposed to a sign saying ‘please drive safely,’” Caram said. “We need something specific to hold them to.”

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