What, if anything, will the Judge say about the leases that are intended to be carbon sequestration sites? How can BOEM sell OCS leases for purposes that were neither announced nor environmentally assessed? What do EarthJustice and the other plaintiffs think about the sequestration bids given that the environmental community is split on CCS?
Who is going to pay the enormous cost of sequestration on the Outer Continental Shelf – platforms, wells, pipelines, processing equipment, maintenance, monitoring, decommissioning, and more? The Federal government (i.e. taxpayers) features large in this grand scheme, and will no doubt be assuming most of the economic and performance risks. And all of these costs are for disposal purposes, not for offshore energy production of any kind.
Together with the bipartisan infrastructure bill enacted in November, which included more than $12 billion in funding for carbon capture and carbon removal technologies, the Build Back Better legislation would hand fossil fuel companies nearly every item on their carbon capture wishlist.
Inside Climate News
The reality of offshore CCS is not anywhere near as simple as portrayed in the slick graphic below:

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