The following is from the Carbon Capture Sequestration meeting held at Grand Lake High School on Thursday, July 24:

Entities from Cameron Parish and Southwest Louisiana were in attendance to listen to the presentation.

Mike Nichols and John West spoke at the meeting. Both are scientists and Nichols is a manager of the Cameron Creole Watershed Project. They both spoke on the facts about Carbon Capture. They had slides and gave percentages on many items. Carbon Capture is actually carbon dioxide capture.

Nichols spoke on how concentrated carbon dioxide is deadly and when it’s buried at a highly pressured rate it has a tendency to escape. He showed lots of maps and denoted where the CO2 is already buried such as near the plant in Sulphur and the one in Bossier. This is not only a carbon dioxide capture but also has other contaminants such as benzene in it. Carbonic was also discussed, which eats metal and concrete when it escapes and cause leaks in the oil pipes. It takes approximately two years to get a permit to do this, so the pipeline folks have a 2-year lead on the Hackberry area. One attendee asked why we had not been addressing this two years ago and he said they were addressing it but not loudly.

Nichols talked about the leakage causing earthquakes and then he really pressed the button with the talk about eminent domain and the fact that he has been fighting the oil companies for five years in the courts due to the fact that they were trying to take over his land with two 38-inch pipelines.

John West talked briefly on the book “Unsettled” which he encouraged everyone to read. It talks about climate change and what things that have been said about climate change is mostly untrue.

To read the rest of this story, please see page three of the print edition of The Cameron Parish Pilot.