Oct 13, 2020   SOURCE: BusinessWire

Gulf Coast Sequestration Makes Initial Filing to Obtain EPA Permit for CCS Project

Gulf Coast Sequestration (GCS) today announced that the company has initiated the process for obtaining a Class VI Underground Injection Control permit from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by filing a detailed technical submission to delineate its “area of review.” This is a significant step in the company’s effort to build and operate the country’s premier carbon sequestration project, which is designed to permanently store more than 80 million tons of carbon in deep geologic formations.

Once completed, the GCS “hub” is expected to be the largest geologic carbon capture sequestration (CCS) project in the U.S. and one of the largest in the world. With the capacity to sequester 2,700,000 tons of CO₂ annually, it will be equivalent to removing about 600,000 passenger vehicles from the road every year or the equivalent annual carbon avoided from 2,000 wind turbines.

The filing marks a milestone for GCS, which controls both the surface and subsurface rights for a large, contiguous landholding in southwest Louisiana. The permit application comes after years of comprehensive data collection and analysis which determined that the area’s geologic pore space is ideally suited to build and operate a world-class carbon sequestration project.

“This filing is a long time coming and an exciting moment for GCS,” said Gray Stream, President of Matilda Stream Management, Inc., the owner of GCS. “We have done our homework, and our permit application reflects our commitment to robust environmental compliance. We look forward to working with EPA to secure the approvals needed to develop, construct, and operate one of the leading carbon sequestration projects in the world.”

Located in close proximity to one of the nation’s busiest industrial corridors, GCS will partner with industrial customers to capture CO₂ and safely contain it underground. In recent years, technological developments and new federal tax credits have made it economically attractive for some industrial facilities to install CCS systems to dramatically reduce their CO₂ emissions.

“At GCS, we believe that CCS is the best way to tackle industrial greenhouse gas emissions,” said GCS principal Benjamin Heard. “By providing safe and secure storage for carbon dioxide, GCS will assist industrial customers in achieving their sustainability goals. Working together, we can help to steer the United States toward a more economically and environmentally sustainable future.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that the costs of tackling climate change could more than double if CCS technology is not developed and widely deployed. The GCS project capitalizes on CCS’s vital – and singular – capability for reducing the emissions from existing industrial facilities.

The team behind GCS includes several of the world’s leading experts on carbon capture and sequestration who bring insight and experience on geology, petrophysics, seismic, and reservoir modeling and simulation as well as the complex legal and regulatory issues involved with a project of this size and scale.

More information about GCS is online at www.gcscarbon.com.