Community Capture: Examining Public Participation Patterns and Concerns in United States Carbon Capture Projects

Abstract

During Joe Biden’s presidency, carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) rose in salience on the United States climate agenda, claiming a host of tax incentives and funding streams through President Biden’s robust set of climate policies. As new proposals for CCS projects emerged across the country, so did many communities’ vehement opposition to the technology and its siting in their localities. Public participation and community engagement have become important considerations for CCS project developers, but most of the literature on the CCS and public participation nexus has adopted a limited instrumental approach. In other words, most scholars view engagement with communities not through substantive or normative lenses — that engagement can produce important changes in proposals or that it is the morally right thing to do, respectively — but rather view engagement as a conduit to gaining acceptance. In Community Capture: Examining Public Participation Patterns and Concerns in United States Carbon Capture Projects, I adopt an environmental justice framework to interrogate the real-world patterns of public participation using Arnstein’s Ladder of Citizen Participation. I ask: What is the degree of public participation in carbon capture projects in the United States between local stakeholders and institutional actors? What underlying stakeholder decisions and mechanisms contribute to this degree? I conducted a two-part study: (1) a descriptive case study analysis wherein I imposed specific parameters on a newspaper article database to understand the patterns of participation across four critical states of Louisiana, Iowa, Illinois, and California, and (2) a singular case study of the Carbon TerraVault I (CTV I) CCS project in Kern County, California, through document analysis and interviews of relevant stakeholders. The results from the descriptive case study analysis indicated that there is a real and systemic pattern of public participation concerns across the four critical states, specifically concentrated around Tokenism, Tokenism with Deficiencies, and Negative Relations (a catch-all Nonparticipation ladder rung created for this research) activity. The results also indicated that communities are afforded little instrumental power in CCS decision-making spaces. The results from the CTV I analysis illuminated a public participation process characterized by the Tokenism with Deficiencies category. The interviews and document analysis suggested that the level of participation may have been facilitated by specific underlying decisions and mechanisms, namely County requirements around information dissemination, disclosure requirements under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), as well as the history of oil and gas in the region. This thesis also provides four policy recommendations to improve procedural justice in CCS projects in the US. I recommended that (1) the state of Louisiana should institute local option elections for CCS projects given communities’ clear opposition to and desire to be involved in decision-making spaces, (2) the EPA should create a rule to expand their ability to consider community opposition in CCS permit approvals, (3) the Department of Energy’s policies around community benefit plans (CBAs) are significantly amended to incentivize normative and substantive approaches to engagement, and (4) that California should amend CEQA to institute local option voting to increase the instrumental power afforded to communities. An environmental justice perspective asks us to value community opinions and center justice in the energy transition. As the world continues to heat up, and companies and governments innovate to fix the climate crisis, research centering environmental justice is more important than ever.