Joining the growing interest in Houston's energy industry to cut emissions by capturing and sequestering carbon dioxide, Denbury Carbon Solutions and Houston-based Gulf Coast Midstream are partnering to develop an underground storage project in southwest Houston by early 2025.
Subsidiaries of the two companies signed a non-binding letter of intent. Denbury, a Plano, Texas-based oil and gas producer, owns a carbon dioxide pipeline 25 miles from the proposed site and currently supplies gas to the Hastings Field which is about 5 miles north of Alvin in Brazoria County.
Gulf Coast Midstream Partners (GCMP) estimates that its underground storage in geologic formations would have a capacity of 400 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. Its injection wells would have an initial capacity of 1.5 million metric tons per year starting in 2025, but further expansions could bring that figure to 9 million metric tons per year, the company said. GCMP has already initiated the Class VI permitting process with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for the project.
Carbon capture and storage is critical to reaching net zero by 2050, according to independent experts like the International Energy Agency and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Recently, Houston was singled out as a prime city for the deployment of carbon capture and storage technology with 11 companies, including ExxonMobil, Chevron, LyondellBasell and Marathon, to name a few, announcing support of the idea, as well as initiatives to capture and safely store up to 50 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year by 2030 and about 100 million metric tons by 2040.
The new southwest Houston area carbon capture project will enhance CO2 offtake and storage access for industrial facilities in the Houston area with the western extension of the Gulf Coast CO2 pipeline infrastructure, said Denbury's President and CEO Chris Kendall.
“Together, GCMP and Denbury are well-positioned to offer a bundled CO2 transportation and permanent sequestration service to meet the evolving needs of the carbon capture sequestration market," said John M. Hopper, GCMP’s CEO.
