DOE’S MCCONNELL: INDUCED SEISMICITY SCARE UNDERSCORES PUBLIC OUTREACH NEED

Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
12/14/12

The end of 2012 brings to a close a year that in more ways than one tested the vitality of carbon capture and storage technology—a sluggish economic recovery, budget cuts, competition from other clean energy technologies and project delays challenged the industry worldwide. But it was the issue of induced seismicity in particular that left industry proponents scrambling in June after two separate reports linked CCS with the potential to induce seismic events. Looking back, Department of Energy Assistant Secretary for Fossil Energy Chuck McConnell said the experience this summer underscored to him the importance of incorporating public outreach efforts into more of DOE’s CCS-related activities. “All of that reminded me that public perception matters,” McConnell said in a recent interview. “It also reinforced that accuracy of public perception and trying to convince people that their attitudes are not worthy of being dealt with is a recipe for disaster.”

McConnell emphasized the need for researchers to have enough experience with CCS projects so they can be more confident in their defense of the technology when issues such as those surface. “People want to know [CCS] is safe, and what we have to do is have the technology, the demonstrations, the confidence to say ‘yes,” he said in a speech last week. “We’re currently in a really important time when answers to questions like that have to be really simple. People need to understand that the science and the confidence behind those answers is real, because when we start answering in paragraphs, we sound unreal.”

Two Papers Raised Seismicity Concerns

CCS advocates were forced to address the issue of induced seismicity in June after two papers and a Senate hearing brought the issue to the forefront. The first analysis, a peer-reviewed National Research Council report, concluded that CCS “may” have the potential to cause “significant” induced seismicity, but also clarified that CO2 storage operations to date have not triggered any felt seismic events. The other paper, written by a pair of Stanford geophysicists and published as a ‘perspectives’ piece in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said there is a “high probability” that small to moderate-sized earthquakes will be triggered by the injection of large volumes of CO2 into the subsurface. The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee held a hearing on both reports in June, where members expressed concern about the reports’ findings and questioned whether Congress should continue funding large-scale demonstration projects.

DOE did not issue an official response to the reports, but other CCS proponents rushed to prepare rebuttals, particularly to the Stanford paper. Many researchers wrote off that analysis as an “opinion piece” and argued that current DOE and Environmental Protection Agency regulations, as well as industry best practices for site characterization and monitoring, eliminate most of the risk for CCS operations inducing felt seismic events. “The [Stanford] analysis assumes that you’re going to sort of start injecting and then close your eyes and do nothing for 60 years,” Julio Friedmann, chief energy technologist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, told GHG Monitor in June. “It puts forward no allowances for your ability to intervene or intercede and do something else, and there is no case where that would never be as so. There is no case in which you would just start injecting and then have an irreversible problem that you couldn’t map, anticipate or manage.”

Straightforward Explanations Needed, McConnell Says

While negative public opinion has not been a major issue in terms of CCS project siting in the U.S. (DOE aimed to develop most of the large-scale CCS projects in its portfolio in areas of the country accustomed to an oil and gas industry presence), public backlash has all but wiped out the industry in some western European countries. Most recently, mounting political pressure and public opposition caused the developers of Germany’s only remaining CCS project to pull out of the country late last year. In 2010, the Dutch government cancelled a CO2 storage project being developed by Shell due to local opposition and later passed a law banning all onshore CO2 storage projects. After wastewater injection operations helped spur some low-magnitude earthquakes in the Midwest earlier this year, some in the CCS industry warned that linking CCS to the issue could sour public opinion, GHG Monitor previously reported (Vol. 7 Issue 3).

After experiencing the scare that ensued surrounding the publishing of the two reports this summer, McConnell emphasized the need to “get out in front” of the issue by pushing ahead with DOE’s CCS demonstration projects. “We need to get to the point where people can see that this isn’t a science project and that it really is commercialization of a technology,” he said. McConnell also praised the outreach work being done by DOE’s regional partnerships. “What we have an obligation to do a better job of taking that scientifically-based, commercially-based information to the public and educating them on the fact that it is safe, that CO2 won’t leak and that it is sound,” he said.