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Chris Landry / The Abbeville Meridional
ExxonMobil Low Carbon Solutions Ventures Manager Joe Colletti points to information on a slide during a presentation to the Vermilion Parish Police Jury that he gave Wednesday concerning the planned Carbon Capture and Storage injection wells on 125,000 acres of property the company owns in Vermilion Parish.

Vermilion Parish looking to partner with ExxonMobil

The Vermilion Parish Police Jury would like to see its coastal restoration efforts boosted by a partnership with ExxonMobil as part of the international oil and gas company’s plans to store captured carbon emissions underground in 125,000 acres of property that ExxonMobil owns in the parish, District 6 police juror Mark Poche said Wednesday after the police jury’s regular monthly meeting.
ExxonMobil representatives gave a presentation to the police jury explaining the carbon capture program that will bring captured CO2 emissions from CF Industries near Donaldsonville in Ascension Parish to the company’s property near Pecan Island, where it will be injected and stored more than 10,000 feet below the surface.
The federal Environmental Protection Agency and state Department of Natural Resources issue the permits for the carbon capture program, Poché said.
“It’s our objective to try to parlay the project to get something in a partnership with Exxon,” Poché said. “We’re fortunate that the partner is Exxon, who has the ability to do this size of a project in the parish. If we can, in our partnership with them, parlay some kind of seed money for coastal restoration, being that this whole project is happening in the coastal areas.”
Poché said the federal government no longer just gives out money for coastal restoration or other projects, it expects those seeking the grants, like Vermilion Parish, to put up money that will then be matched by a grant at a 1-to-3 or 1-to-4 ratio. Poche brought that suggestion up to ExxonMobil Ventures Manager Joe Colletti, who made the slideshow presentation to the police jury.
“Being it’s such a huge project in our parish, and obviously we’re going to have to be a partner with Exxon, I think it would be great for them to do a partnership with us and address our coastal restoration problems, being that this project is all along the coast,” Poché said.
Colletti said the presentation was part of the company’s community engagement policy and a way to promote open dialogue and two-way communications with the local government body. One of the company’s near-term focus areas is coastal preservation, he said, which includes $600,000 the company has donated to support coastal preservation organizations ($500,000 to Ducks Unlimited and $100,000 to the Louisiana CCA).
“We do want a great relationship and a partnership with you,” Poché told Colletti at the end of the presentation when Colletti asked if the police jury had any questions. “I was looking at Channel 10 this morning and I happened to see the one Chevron has with Cameron Parish, where they’re doing all these coastal restoration projects in Cameron. We’re interested in eventually hoping to have some form of partnership with y’all long-term on coastal restoration. I know y’all allocate money throughout the world for different good-neighbor type projects, and we as a jury know the magnitude of this project and what it can do for you in the future of Exxon and for our parish.”
Poche said it was nice that Exxon had contributed to the coastal restoration projects it had, but it would have been better to go through the parish’s coastal restoration team that has a comprehensive plan of what the parish needs as a whole in coastal restoration.
“Every time we do a project, we look at what does step one do to step four,” Poché said. “Everything we do is comprehensive and is thought out a lot before we choose one project. Long-term, we hope that we can form some type of partnership with y’all on that, to where we can identify a comprehensive, parish-wide coastal restoration project using some seed money from y’all. If we get a hundred thousand from y’all, we can get maybe $500,000 from the federal government.”
“That’s helpful context,” Colletti said. “There’s a couple of areas where I’ll tell you that we’ve been supported, and I’m going to ask for your help to understand all those needs and then bring it into that coordinated effort you’re asking about.”
There are three Carbon Capture & Storage facilities being created in Louisiana now, Poche said — the one in Vermilion Parish, one in Plaquemines Parish and one in Cameron Parish.
“It’s an innovative way the federal government is addressing the carbon capture issues that we have in the country,” he said. “It’s ahead of its time. It’s being done already in the northern part of the country, in Wyoming. They’re recognizing how much more we can do to capture carbon along the Mississippi River and the plants that are in the Lake Charles area.”
CCS captures carbon emissions from industrial plants, which are greenhouse gases that affect the climate. In this case, CO2 captured from the smokestacks at CF Industries will be brought to an existing EnLink Midstream pipeline that goes from Ascension Parish to Weeks Island along Vermilion Bay. At Weeks Island, the CO2 will be changed from a gas phase to a liquid phase A short pipeline will be constructed linking CF Industries to the EnLink pipeline, and another pipeline will be constructed from the pipeline’s end point to the property ExxonMobil has owned in Vermilion Parish since 1958.
Eleven plants along the Mississippi are currently committed to the CCS plan.
“Instead of going into the air, it’s going to be injected into a secure vault at 11,000 feet (below ground),” Poche said. “It’s no different than the salt caverns in Delcambre that they inject gas into every day. Same type of formation.”
Colletti explained the carbon capture program at length. Carbon capture is a proven technology that can help the state reach its climate goals.
ExxonMobil anticipates the project coming to fruition in 2025. The company is permitted for two Class 6 wells, which entails the most strict permit application processing program through the EPA in Dallas. The state and EPA are working to transition to the state’s DNR handling the approval process.
There will real-time monitoring of the CO2 the entire way from the CF Industries facility, through the pipeline and into the wells. There will be three monitoring wells, two above the injection zone and one inside the injection zone.
“You want to have real-time data about what the C02 is doing as it’s being injected, if it’s moving or migrating, if it’s doing something different than the models that we’re going to put in our permit applications,” Colletti said. “We will run 300 model simulations on what happens when you inject C02.”
The company will run a 1,000-year model to see what happens over that time. ExxonMobil will be looking to capture and store C02 from its Baton Rouge refinery at some point as well, Colletti said.
The CO2 wells will be sealed with thick, impermeable cap rocks overlying saline formations to hold the C02 in place.

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