What happens when a climate solution risks your community’s safety?

Kimbrelle Eugene Kyereh is a descendant of her town’s founder, Palmer Elkins. She’s actively protesting a proposed carbon capture and storage facility in St. Rose, Louisiana.

ST. ROSE, Louisiana — In the St. Charles Parish neighborhood, only a tall green chain-link fence stands between a block of homes and the future site of a facility that may, among other things, store carbon in efforts to limit planetary heating. 

The $4.6 billion project is part of a new slate of federal efforts bolstering carbon capture and storage, or CCS, a controversial technology that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has identified as an important tool in mitigating climate change. This Louisiana-based plant probably wouldn’t have been possible without the passage of the historic climate change legislation that President Joe Biden signed into law in the summer of 2022. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) dedicated $370 billion toward addressing the climate crisis, by far the largest federal investment in the issue. The IRA further solidified Biden’s commitment for CCS: The law increased tax credits for storing carbon that range from $50 per ton of CO2 to $85 per ton — a whopping 70 percent jump. 

Biden’s IRA promises to be a bonanza for the CCS industry — and the stakes are high. If humanity fails to rein in climate change by either swiftly transitioning away from the dirty energy sources emitting greenhouses gasses or figuring out a way to neutralize them, then many parts of the world could become inhospitable by the end of this century. 

But this major investment has a potential dark side. 

Such carbon storage projects come with local costs — the loss of valuable natural carbon sinks like wetlands, the possibility of dangerous CO2 pipeline ruptures, and an increase in other air pollutants — and it’s unclear how much such developments will even help curb the climate crisis. And compounding these costs is the reality that many CCS projects are planned in communities of color already burdened by industrial pollution, poverty, low-quality housing, and other socioeconomic issues.

In Louisiana, an industry-friendly state that produces a lot of crude oil and natural gas, there are now even more incentives for development: At the end of last year, the Biden administration shifted the ability to approve CCS permits from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to the less-stringent state regulators. This has helped make Louisiana even more of a CCS hotspot. 

That carbon-capture project — an ammonia plant proposed in the historically Black Louisiana community of St. Rose — underscores the social cost that comes with trying to phase out the extractive industries driving the climate crisis.

But to understand where and on whom the cost of carbon storage hits hardest, it’s important to grasp why such a project is being proposed here in the first place.

Where plantations paved the way for industry

St. Rose lies just west of New Orleans, right along the east bank of the Mississippi River. On a quiet, single-lane road, grass covers a levee that defends the riverside communities when the water swells. When I visited this summer, barges and tankers dominated the waterway while western cattle egrets, with their salmon-kissed white feathers, swooped down onto the landscape. 

Previously plantation land, St. Rose was founded in 1873 by Palmer Elkins, a free man of color who bought the town’s first three tracts of land for less than $950 (about $25,000 in today’s currency), and named the community for himself: Elkinsville-Freetown. It was one of the scores of “Freedom Towns” or “freedmen’s towns” established by or for a predominantly Black populace during and after the era of slavery in the United States. 

According to research gathered by Johns Hopkins University sociologist Michael Levien, Elkins was part of a colony of Black folks recently liberated from slavery who managed their own fields under a US government agency established in 1865 called the Freedmen’s Bureau. Even though the government walked back on its promise and shut the colony down less than two years after its inception, Elkins eventually saved up enough money to establish Elkinsville-Freetown nearly 10 years later. He created the town’s first city streets and invited other freed people to live there, too. Today, many of St. Rose’s current residents are descendants of Elkins and 18 other founding families. 

These days, the community of 7,500 is disproportionately harmed by pollution and industry — the sort of environmental racism that affects people across the US and the globe. The problem is especially ugly in Louisiana, where locals experience higher rates of cancer from air pollution exposure in what experts call Cancer Alley, an 85-mile sacrifice zone between Baton Rouge and New Orleans that includes St. Rose.

Today, many industrial plants within Cancer Alley — such as a Dow Chemical petrochemical facility and a Shell refining and chemicals plant, to name a few — stand in former plantation tracts where many residents’ ancestors used to toil in the field. In 1922, an oil export terminal replaced the nearby Cedar Grove Plantation. Now owned by North American company International Matex-Tank Terminals (IMTT), the terminal remains one of the town’s most prominent features and still exports crude oil, as well as other liquids like petrochemicals and vegetable oil. In 2022, industry polluters were responsible for releasing nearly 3 million pounds of air toxins like ammonia and the petrochemical n-Hexane within a 10-mile radius of the community, per EPA data.

Already, St. Rose residents experiences higher cancer risks and respiratory illness rates from their exposure to air pollution than the national average, according to federal data from the EPA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“As long as I could remember, I smelled the chemicals,” said Kimbrelle Eugene Kyereh, who founded her local nonprofit Refined Community Empowerment after she learned about the ammonia plant. “The tank farm on the fence-line of Elkinsville-Freetown St. Rose came [50] years after the free men and women of color settled the community. And when they came, they never left.”

The community’s access to the river and the plantation land that eventually made way for the significant infrastructure of the IMTT export terminal makes it a convenient location for the ammonia carbon-capture project partially funded by the IRA’s tax credits. 

The project’s developer, St. Charles Clean Fuels, hopes to produce 8,000 metric tons of ammonia a day — a staggering figure that’s far above what most plants produce — that it would then load onto shipping vessels for international export through IMTT’s existing terminal. The production of ammonia, a chemical that’s predominantly developed into fertilizers that enrich soils and help grow food and crops, is responsible for 1.8 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. There’s a need to decarbonize ammonia production — and fast: Production is projected to increase by nearly 40 percent by 2050. The market is also expected to triple by 2050 as low-carbon ammonia enters the clean energy market as fuel for ships and power generation. 

St. Charles Clean Fuels plans to supply some of that low-carbon ammonia — so-called “blue ammonia” — with its proposed plant. “Blue ammonia” is an industry term, so we’ll use it sparingly throughout this article, but developers use the terminology to distinguish these projects as nearly carbon neutral because the CO2 by-product has been captured and stored. In the case of the St. Rose plant, the company claims the facility will capture and sequester over 99 percent of the carbon dioxide generated during the ammonia production process. A third party would then handle transporting the greenhouse gas in pipelines before finally storing it somewhere underground.

“In almost any conceivable scenario for a successful energy transition, chemical fuels will be needed in addition to electricity,” said Stephen Crolius, president and co-founder of Carbon Neutral Consulting, which works with companies developing technologies and plants to decarbonize the economy. “Ammonia will likely be among the most prominent of these carbon-free hydrogen fuels because it lends itself to safe low-cost storage, transport, and distribution, very much along the lines of propane and liquified petroleum gas.” Crolius is also president emeritus of the Ammonia Energy Association, an industry group for which he sits on the board of directors.

The promise to capture nearly all of its emissions qualifies the development for an estimated $425 million in federal CCS subsidies. But since this is a new project, it’s not actually reducing the amount of carbon we’re already emitting into the atmosphere; it’s merely attempting to balance its own emissions. Retrofitting existing plants with this tech would actually reduce the ammonia sector’s overall carbon footprint. Creating entirely new plants with CCS added doesn’t decrease the sector’s overall emissions, at least not while the old facilities are still running. That 1 percent of CO2 not captured at the “blue” ammonia plant would still amount to an additional 154,000 tons that wouldn’t have otherwise existed.

The community is wary. The facility won’t capture all the polluting byproducts of producing ammonia, either.

On a rainy evening at the end of spring, I met Eugene Kyereh, 54, who is also a descendant of the town’s founder, Elkins, at a local restaurant called Boudreaux’s River Road. She comes here often, but her brother Darris Eugene, 61, won’t step foot into Boudreaux’s, which served only white people when they were growing up. “It was off limits to us,” he told me the following morning from the hair salon he inherited from their mother. 

The IMTT export terminal sits some 500 feet away from his business, next door to Eugene Kyereh’s home and just down the street from the restaurant. As we ate gumbo and fish, she recalled a troubling memory. “[The smell of the air] was so bad that one day in June,” she told me, “my son and I decided we had to evacuate.”

She’s worried that industrial pollution will only get worse if developer St. Charles Clean Fuels builds its multibillion-dollar ammonia plant next door. After all, ammonia is a dangerous air pollutant.

“High levels of ammonia are deadly, and even lower levels from normal operations can cause breathing problems,” said Kimberly Terrell, director of community engagement and research scientist at the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic. She’s published several peer-reviewed studies related to Cancer Alley and the health impacts residents face from living so close to industry. In 2023, the IMTT chemical storage terminal emitted about 51 tons per year of VOCs, a mix of toxic chemicals, adjacent to Elkinsville-St. Rose. “An ammonia plant would only worsen the pollution crisis in this community,” Terrell said.

Can the blue ammonia plant justify itself? 

The ammonia plant is still a maybe — it needs a federal water permit, an air permit, and a coastal use permit from the state approved before construction can begin. So far, the developer hasn’t secured any. Agencies are likely to issue their decisions by the fall. The developer is optimistic about the plant’s future, but local experts are more skeptical because the facility would lie in a floodplain. But if the plant is approved, St. Charles Clean Fuels could break ground within six to eight months and have the ammonia plant running no later than 2028.

“The development of St. Charles Clean Fuels represents a significant step toward reducing the carbon footprint of valuable and versatile liquid fuels, mitigating greenhouse gas emissions from hard-to-abate energy uses,” said Chandra Stacie​​​​, director of community relations for St. Charles Clean Fuels, in an emailed statement. 

But how would any of this work? Well, let’s start with a quick chemistry lesson: To produce ammonia, you need nitrogen and hydrogen. 

Since nitrogen makes up 78 percent of the air we breathe, developers can pull nitrogen directly out of the air using an air separation unit. Then, they need to combine it with hydrogen, which is trickier to procure. One source is methane, a potent greenhouse gas. In a process called autothermal reforming, reactors use oxygen and steam to separate hydrogen from both the steam and the methane with little combustion, concentrating carbon dioxide to ease its capture. 

That’s where CCS comes in. Plants like these are designed to strip the carbon from the process gas with a bespoke adsorbent that’s perfectly shaped to capture CO2 molecules. It’s sort of like a sponge that can soak up the carbon. By altering the pressure, the gas can be released from the block and moved for transport and storage. 
This creates blue ammonia, but the process isn’t perfect. Methane is still a fossil fuel. And the natural gas it’s pulled from is dirty and full of other substances, too, so the plant has to purify it during the process. In St. Rose, developer St. Charles Clean Fuels estimates the plant will still release the equivalent of what some 780,000 cars would emit in a whole year even after capturing 99 percent of the approximately 5 million tons the facility would release otherwise.

Sometimes, emissions wind up higher than estimated. For instance, the Gorgon facility — a $3 billion CCS project in Australia from Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Shell that began to store carbon dioxide in 2019, three years after starting production — said it would store 80 percent of its carbon emissions from producing liquid natural gas. The Gorgon facility missed that target during its first five years of operation by 50 percent due to technical issues that need to be addressed, according to a 2022 report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. Now, the facility is planning to expand despite lacking evidence that it’s properly capturing and storing carbon at all. Another 62 million metric tons of greenhouse gasses could be released annually as a result. Operators received at least $60 million in support from the Australian government. 

And that’s what worries many advocates. Taxpayers foot the bill for a technology that may perpetuate fossil fuel polluters — the ones that knowingly created climate change in the first place — and even build a new market for their products given the natural gas feedstock. How does that help wean the world off of fossil fuels? 

It would be one thing if only existing polluters were upgrading their facilities with CCS to lower their emissions. We should see some emissions reduction then. Instead, new projects are popping up across the US, creating previously non-existent sources of emissions and pollution. There’s the blue ammonia plant in St. Rose — but it isn’t the only one.

According to a tracker from watchdog nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project (EIP), 10 other blue ammonia plants have been proposed in Louisiana where most are expected to be completed by the end of the decade. However, CCS isn’t exclusive to ammonia; more than 40 other projects have been proposed across the state that mainly involve building hubs for storing carbon. These are the sorts of third-party partners St. Charles Clean Fuels will eventually need to move the carbon it captures from manufacturing ammonia. Across the US, over a hundred more have been announced, according to EIP.

“Our concerns with this trend are numerous,” said Courtney Bernhardt, research director at the EIP. “Not only will there be environmental and health impacts, largely in already overburdened areas, but also because government laws and regulations are barely catching up.”

Two factors are driving this explosion in investment. There’s the market, which is finally hungry for low-emission energy sources. Customers now exist in European and Asian countries that are trying to replace dirty energy with cleaner alternatives. There’s also the shipping industry. Right now, nasty bunkers and tankers that transport chemicals and fuels contribute to about 3 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, but the UN’s International Maritime Organization wants to hit net zero by or around 2050. Net zero involves eliminating emissions at the source where you can and capturing them where you can’t by sequestering carbon naturally in ecosystems or industrially through plants. 

Federal subsidies and tax benefits have also bolstered the market. The Biden administration has been investing heavily in hydrogen and CCS. Over the last year alone, over $1 billion in direct funding has been announced. 

Blue ammonia and CCS may offer a miniscule amount of decreased emissions. But what about the people who must live by these plants?

“This injustice that’s never been corrected”

Since the oil export terminal that eventually became IMTT came to the community in 1922, the industrial sector has expanded throughout St. Rose. Most residents can see rows of four-story-tall chemical storage tanks from their backyards. The facility is impossible to miss, and it has become intertwined with many of the lives of the people who live in St. Rose. IMTT sponsors community events, hosts dinners, and has contributed to local schools and charities, but those who live in St. Rose and depend on the company for support or work face an ongoing risk to their own health. The community’s proximity to polluters is a direct legacy of slavery and a symptom of the plantation-to-plant pipeline. 

“That’s still a symptom of the plantation economy and also the disregard for Black health, for Black bodies,” said Joy Banner, co-founder and co-director of The Descendants Project, a nonprofit seeking intergenerational healing for Louisiana’s Black riverside communities overwhelmed by environmental harms. “Even the ways that the benefit to our community lies in the labor of it all. It doesn’t matter if the job is killing you in the long run. It doesn’t matter if we’re losing population as a result of these dirty industries.”

Levien of Johns Hopkins University is currently in Louisiana to write a book on the social consequences of CCS. “Those free towns wind up becoming frontline communities,” he told me after we ran inside a New Orleans coffee shop to avoid a downpour. “It’s this injustice that’s never been corrected.”

In St. Rose, locals have been complaining about odors to the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) for at least 20 years. In 2023, DEQ received six formal odor complaints from residents attributed to IMTT. This year, there have been four. Recent numbers are likely underestimated, Terrell said; not everyone reports the smells to the state. IMTT has also directed residents to complain directly to the company, which won’t be reflected in the public record.

“I don’t think it’s possible to live so close to a facility of the scale of IMTT, knowing how much emissions IMTT reports, and to not be impacted by that,” said Terrell when I met her in her New Orleans office. 

During my visit, just about everyone had a story to tell about the ways they or their loved ones have suffered from what they believe is industry’s doing. Rosemary Green, a vivacious 69-year-old woman who wore a purple patterned scarf on her head, has woken up in the middle of the night choking from what she believes are the chemical smells. Her 68-year-old husband, Thoni Green, has lost his sense of smell altogether. They’re trying to grow roses in their yard, but many flowers die. Their home directly borders the proposed site of the ammonia plant.

“Look at these leaves,” she said from her front yard, pointing to yellowing leaves. “This was a rose bush from my grandmother’s house. I flew this thing out to NOLA and kept this thing alive. When I first got it, it was beautiful, and then all of a sudden, it started dying.” 

In Eugene Kyereh’s family, at least five people have been diagnosed with cancer. Two family members have passed away and two are in remission. One is actively fighting still. Four others have died from complications related to neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s, a brain disorder that scientists have begun to link to exposure to particulate matter, a form of air pollution. That’s how Eugene Kyereh lost her mom 10 years ago. The activist herself has suffered two miscarriages over the years; research suggests that air pollution exposure in early pregnancy is linked to miscarriage. Exact causation is hard to determine, but the fear the residents harbor is real.

Now, the community must contend with what an ammonia plant may bring. 

Terrell is alarmed over the health issues the facility may exacerbate. Exposure to ammonia has been linked to health issues ranging from coughing and nose irritation to respiratory issues and lung damage. Enough ammonia exposure can kill someone. Developers say they plan to build this plant cleaner than conventional ammonia facilities, but CCS tech can’t stop air pollution altogether.

According to the draft air permit, St. Charles Clean Fuels anticipates the plant will release nearly 67 tons of nitrogen oxides that are hazardous to public health and 59 tons of ammonia every year. While that amount of ammonia is legal in Louisiana, it would exceed the air standards in Massachusetts, a state that has taken a harder stance against polluters to protect public health. 

“The health and well-being of our employees, the operations team at IMTT, and the residents of the surrounding communities are SCCF’s top priority,” said Stacie of St. Charles Clean Fuels. “Our facilities are designed with the utmost regard for safety such that none of our plant workers and no one in the community is ever exposed to concentrated ammonia.”

The plant will be outfitted with emergency shutdown systems and safety valves in the case of an emergency, per Stacie. 

What keeps Eugene Kyereh up at night, however, is the potential risks from leaky CCS infrastructure. Carbon dioxide isn’t just a pollutant. It’s an asphyxiant. That means people exposed to it essentially can’t breathe. To make matters worse, there are no clinics or hospitals in St. Rose.

St. Charles Clean Fuels executives say they will develop plans to integrate monitoring systems and emergency response to prevent a crisis or keep people safe should one occur, Stacie said.

In 2020, heavy rains — the same weather patterns common in Louisiana — caused a landslide that strained a CO2 pipeline and caused it to rupture near Satartia, Mississippi. After being exposed to the CO2 leaking from the pipeline, 45 people were hurt. Many victims collapsed, and emergency vehicles couldn’t get in.

A historical town facing multiple threats

Three years ago, Hurricane Ida’s 110-mile-per-hour winds tore apart roofs and windows in St. Rose. Today, houses all over the neighborhood are still boarded up or covered in blue tarps. Roads remain bumpy with potholes. Some residents are still rebuilding. 

This year, on June 1, the official start of hurricane season, Eugene Kyereh organized a health fair to inform her neighbors about the ammonia plant. Thunderstorms had been tormenting the town for days. That gray morning, rain clouds brooded over the Mississippi River, but many community members, activists — and even industry executives from St. Charles Clean Fuels — showed up.

After a prayer, some live sax, and a hefty meal of green beans and chicken, industry officials took the stage podium.

That day, Eugene Kyereh walked gracefully through the audience wearing a vibrant red blazer, her natural curls bouncing above her shoulders. She seemed to know everyone as she passed the mic from person to person, giving them space to air their grievances directly to the companies. And then she addressed them. The leak in Satartia, Mississippi was “one of the worst things that can happen,” she said to St. Charles Clean Fuels executives. “This is the thing that really alarmed me and one of the reasons why I started Refined Community Empowerment.”

“How can we have a blue ammonia plant when we’re already overburdened with chemicals from IMTT?” she asked them. “How is this going to be a help to us?”

Hurricane season is back. It’s projected to be among the worst in decades due to record-breaking ocean temperatures from climate change. The season’s first hurricane, Beryl, broke records as the strongest June storm ever recorded. It killed at least 36 people in Houston alone. 

CCS may weaken the storms of future generations — maybe it’ll one day save the world if researchers can make it cost-effective and safe — but today, the technology still doesn’t work as intended. In the meantime, companies pursue incentives intended to address the climate crisis, giving them cover for sacrificing the health of Black communities in the name of global progress on CO2 emissions.

“The industry is taking over,” said Sharon Lavigne, an activist who has become internationally recognized for blocking a plastics refinery in her community a few parishes away. We spoke as Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” played in the background. “This was a historical town. Why should we roll over and let the industry come in here and destroy our history?”

This story was supported by a reporting grant from The Fund for Environmental Journalist of The Society of Environmental Journalists.