Environmental Justice and CCS Infrastructure: Overlaps and Oversights at the National and State Levels

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is critical in meeting U.S. decarbonization goals. Recently, tax incentives and federal grants have spurred interest in CCS resulting in dozens of projects in various stages of development across the country. The federal government has created metrics to measure which communities have been historically disadvantaged or overburdened by pollution and has made efforts to not unnecessarily harm these communities as CCS is deployed at scale. Because CCS is comprised of three distinct components that could occur at distant geographic locations, this article describes preliminary models that show where the most economically feasible capture, storage, and transportation locations for industrial emissions are likely to be, and by intersecting these results with federal metrics regarding environmental justice, explores the scale of impacts CCS may have on disadvantaged communities, with particular focus on the applicability of national tract-level data sets on Wyoming.