Publication Date

Spring 2024

Degree Type

Master's Project

Department

Urban and Regional Planning

First Advisor

Charles Rivasplata

Keywords

Policy alternatives, CO2 mineralization, Efficient CO2 seperation

Abstract

This report serves primary purpose of finding prospective policies that could be useful in CARB’s new carbon sequestration program as mandated by S. B. 905. The bill states program goals and provides several objectives that direct the California Natural Resources Agency (CNRA), the California Air Resource Board (CARB), and the California Geological Survey (CGS, or just Survey) with various responsibilities. Curiously, S.B. 905 does not mention the Office of State Fire Marshal (OSFM or CalFire), although it has primary responsibility for issuing permits for hazardous pipelines as an agent of the federal Pipelines and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA).

Pipelines for transporting carbon dioxide have been in use in this country for decades in oil operations and there have been proposals to use them in local and national networks for carbon sequestration. The idea is to transport captured emission carbon dioxide from hard to abate industries to underground storage in California and elsewhere. The IRS 45Q tax incentive would more than cover the present cost of operations and levelized cost of construction capital. The federal Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) published a set of guidelines for federal agencies to coordinate their cooperation.

However, S. B. 905 prohibits carbon dioxide pipeline transfers across parcel boundaries until the PHMSA issues a Notice of Final Rulemaking from one of its present proceedings. That was two years ago and the PHMSA planned to reveal preliminary results at the end of May 2024, but did not. The PHMSA made a solicitation for research that could address a problem, or the causes of a serious event.

There was an accidental release in a pipeline that was transferring carbon dioxide from Mississippi to Texas. Accidental release? It was an explosion that left a 30 ft. crater and created a huge plume of carbon dioxide that travelled with the prevailing winds and settled to the ground before it dispersed. It affected the small town of Satartia where a local hospital admitted 200 people from the incident. The concentrated carbon dioxide could have asphyxiated them, but the weather service and the first responders moved people out of harm’s way. It is amazing that no one died. It all happened fast: 80,000 barrels in 8 minutes according to the investigative report. All because of an earth movement caused by heavy rains that placed a strain on an underground pipeline. The most that the PHMSA could do was levy fines, force the sale of the pipeline operator to Exxon and look to the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) for help. Other researchers published interim results in 2023 indicating that they were close to developing a new design tool that can delimit a safe operating region to prevent running ductile fracture (RDF). The PHMSA contracted researchers to investigate pipeline characteristics under mechanical threats and they completed their work at the end of 2023. The information was sent vii to an API standards committee for potential incorporation. Once standardized, the PHMSA can issue preliminary and final rulings published in the Federal Register and required for all pipeline management systems. The standards committee may require additional work to support application to supercritical carbon dioxide pipelines.

Meanwhile, a nascent industry began to form: Negative Emissions Technology. Academics and companies saw their chance to invent and develop new principles and techniques that might scale to the need for the megatons and gigatons of carbon dioxide that California and the industrial world emit every year. The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide measured at the Mauna Loa observatory goes up every year as the average temperature increase climbs closer to 1.5 °C. Wildfires burn in summer and floods deluge various states, including California. Industries still need to lower their emissions, but plants have difficulty capturing their emissions, let alone sequestering them. That is where the new and scaled up but dated technologies fit. There are inventions that I report below that offer both alternatives to pipelines and much better ways to capture carbon dioxide from industrial emissions.

A startup called Verdox teamed up with CarbFix, an organization based in Iceland to run a successful sequestration pilot for a paper mill in Washington. They won a million-dollar prize offered by XPrize. The Princeton NZA study notes a feasibility study perform permanent sequestration for a power plant in Sparks, Nevada. It will not be possible without a pipeline to Northern California, so that project may have to wait a while. Verdox is not waiting. They are working with Norsk Hydro of Sweden to capture low concentration carbon dioxide emitted from an aluminum smelter.

UCLA spinoff Equatic is not waiting for pipelines either. They are moving fast to build a commercial scale direct ocean capture and storage (DOCS) system that takes carbon dioxide out of seawater by turning it into dissolved and suspended minerals. Pilot and small-scale systems are already in operation. The system produces pure hydrogen as a byproduct that defrays the cost of operation in addition to salable carbon offsets for partner Boeing.

CARB now has alternatives worth investigating. Successful sequestration is now taking place without pipelines! This leads me to recommend policies that address the report’s research question, with or without carbon dioxide pipelines as needed, or not. Here is my list: 1. CARB protocol for permanent basalt storage 2. CARB protocol for permanent ocean storage 3. CARB protocol for Agro-sequestration 4. Require the most efficient gas separation technology in CCS projects. viii 5. Use DOCS projects to reach net-zero goals by covering residual emissions (not DAC). 6. Use appropriate technology CCS according to CO₂ source locale. 7. Model CO₂ gas pipelines at moderate operating pressures for local transport before supercritical equations of state, failure modes, and precursor conditions become known. 8. Require mobile carbon capture for the existing HD truck fleet. 9. Project proposal: industrial scale DOCS project 10. Pilot project proposal: Agro-sequestration project

My policy analysis reference work establishes six steps for policy analysis: 1 “verify, define, and detail the problem”; 2 “establish evaluation criteria”; 3 “identify alternative policies”; 4 “evaluate alternative policies”; 5 “display and distinguish among alternative policies”; 6 “monitor and evaluate the implemented policy” (Patton, Sawicki and Clark 2016, 43). Section 1.1 provide details on how I applied this process to elucidate the research question. Section 1.9 details how I applied the process was to analyze carbon sequestration policy and arrive at the recommendations.

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