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We're still following breaking news of a major gas league in Yazoo County in your Highway four thirty three and Highway.

At around seven pm on a Saturday in late February, residents of the small village of Starsha in Mississippi heard a loud boom, the major gas lake in Yazoo Counties and a whole town fleeing their homes after heavy rains.

A pipeline carrying carbon dioxide or CO two ruptured.

Ten minutes after the rupture, the private company that ran the pipelines close the main operating valves Forsatarsha, but in those ten minutes, more than thirty thousand barrels of CO two have been released into the air.

Now residents started experiencing symptoms and called nine.

One one I don't know if CONN they busted it, whatever, but it's kind.

Of My daughter had breathing problem.

She's on the floor right now.

We'll got here.

CO two is an asphyxient At high concentrations, you can't breathe.

Its crowd, you know bad in here.

The pipeline company didn't immediately notify local authorities about what had happened, so first responders reacted without having all the details.

Yes, we've got a ghastly up payer.

CO two displaces oxygen, so combustion engines like the ones in regular vehicles don't work properly.

In the event of a CO two leak, Satasha ambulances had trouble responding to calls.

Some residents had to drive themselves to the hospital.

In total, forty five people were hospitalized for CO two poisoning that day, and at least two hundred had to be evacuated.

Years later, some of Satasha's residents still report health problems related to the gas leak.

After the Satarsha incident, there was a two year investigation by the federal government, which found that there were glaring gaps in how CO two pipelines were regulated, so the government started working on new rules.

By January of this year, five years after the incident, there was finally an official proposal with new regulations that would prevent something like this from happening again, but the Trump administration quickly rescinded them before they went into effect.

Satarsha is an example of what can happen when a CO two pipeline ruptures and leaks, and in the years to come, there could be tens of thousands more of these pipelines.

That's because private companies want to build them for something called carbon capture and storage, which I'll get into later, but it's essentially a way to trap CO two to keep it from going up in the atmosphere as a gas.

The plans include California, one of the most environmentally regulated states.

And here's something to keep in mind.

There's a federal tax credit that helps fund carbon capture and storage projects.

And hear this.

The Trump Administration's Big Beautiful Bill is getting rid of or phasing out most environmentally friendly programs, but not this one.

In fact, the bill is not only keeping it, it's going to expand it because depending on who you ask, this is a critical way to address the climate crisis or a subsidy for big oil.

So we're going to California's Central Valley, where there's a plan to build CO two pipelines.

Many in the community are afraid of its risks and unsure if it's benefits.

From Fudromdia.

It's Latino USA im Maria no Josa Today, producer of Victoria Estrada, brings us a deep look into carbon capture.

It's a controversial technology that addresses the climate crisis, and we look at how it's being tested in California.

In twenty twenty four, the planet reached an all time high of carbon emissions.

Carbon dioxide or CO two, has been proven to be one of the main factors that's contributing to the planets warming.

California, which is the fourth largest economy in the world, has vowed to go carbon neutral by twenty forty five.

That means that it will remove as much carbon from the atmosphere as it releases.

To achieve that goal, specialized technologies are coming into the state, including the one we mentioned, carbon capture and storage.

Latino USA producer Victoria Estrada traveled to California Central Valley.

That's the place where many new carbon capture projects are being proposed, and Victoria brings us this story.

I turned onto Buttonwellow Road, which turns into Elkell Road.

Kerr County is at the southernmost part of California Central Valley, about two hours north of Los Angeles.

This is fertile land.

Kerrent County alone produces almost all of the carrots weed in the United States.

More than half of the population here is Latino and a lot of them work in the fields.

There's a lot of trees.

I'm not sure what kind of fruit trees they are.

There's another industry that's also very present.

Oil.

Yeah, that's the first wall.

As I drove through the Elk Hills oil field, I saw hills covered in pump jacks machines that pull oil from the wells.

Looks like watching a dinosaur, you know.

They're metal and look kind of like giant hammers or pick axis with a polly attached to one end of the head.

I drove through here because this is a place where the first carbon capture and storage project in all of California is slated to go up.

The project is owned by the California Resources Corporation, which is the largest oil and gas company in the State.

They're calling this project carbon terra vault Ie.

So what exactly is carbon capture and storage?

Let me explain.

Let's say you've got a coal fired power plant or a natural gas plant that's emitting carbon dioxide, and on top of the factory's chimney where the smoke comes out, you put equipment to trap the CO two.

Once captured, the CO two go through a chemical process and it's turned from gas into a type of liquid that you can then inject underground to store Here in el Kills.

The plan is to put the liquid CO two in the underground deposits that used to hold oil, hopefully permanently or at least for hundreds of years.

Some people in the community are nervous about the project, in part because of oil companies behind it.

We grow up with oil and gas wells in our backyards next to schools.

This is CSA Aguirri.

He works at the Central California Environmental Justice Network in Bakersfield, Kerrent County's largest city.

There's so much cut corners in California oil and gas law and enforcement.

He's seen firsthand how government regulations aren't always enough to keep oil companies in check.

The number One issue for a lot of government agencies is capacity, and they don't have the manpower, they don't have the hours, they don't have the needed tools in order to properly inspect and respond to leaks because of the vast amount of infrastructure that exists.

And looking at the possibility of a local carbon capture project is making him recap the drawbacks of living in a place with a strong oil industry.

In twenty fourteen, there was a pipeline leak that caused eight families to be evacuated for nine months from their homes.

And we have breaking news out of Arvin tonight where several homes have been evacuated due to a potentially dangerous gas leak.

Flammable gases, including methane, had been accumulating underneath the soil and started spreading to the houses.

Officials don't know how long the company's pipeline has been leaking.

And the gas leak it was discovered coming out of the outlets of a room of a woman that was pregnant.

Residents in this neighborhood behind me say that they could smell gas for several days.

One in that house has chronic bloody noses or allergies.

One of the people that was living inside of that house has lung cancer.

This wasn't an isolated event, says that and his team have documented other leaks in Current County that want to notice for months, even years, and the gas leaks, along with other pollutants from the oil and agriculture industries, have turned Current County into the place with the worst air quality in the country.

Kurrent County's Planning and Natural Resources departments said they're imposing more than ninety measures to mitigate risks on the Carbon Terrible project to prevent anything like what happened in Mississippi.

But since carving capture is an industrial and chemical process that releases.

Other pollutants, one of the biggest concerns is how is this going to add to our pollution burden.

There's also issues with the place where Carbon Terra Vault is supposed to store the CO two Because there's so many wells in the Elk Hills oil field, CO two could leak through any unused well that hasn't been properly sealed.

Plus this is a seismic area.

Geologists estimate that there's a twenty percent chance that an earthquake could damage the project in the next hundred years.

So despite all of these questions, if this is a way to address the climate crisis, our carbon capture projects worth it.

We actually have no information about the amount of money that the American tacpayer is paying for this purported climate solution, and whether or not it's a good deal, Like, are we getting anything for it?

That's after the break.

Stay with us.

Yes, hey, we're back.

And before the break, we heard about a technology coming to California's Central Valley.

It's called carbon capture and storage.

Supporters say it's a way to address the climate crisis, but for others it simply has way too many potentially deadly risks that the New USA producer Victori Esta that is going to continue the reporting now.

Carbon capture has been presented as a win win solution for the climate crisis.

It removes CO two from the atmosphere, it creates jobs, and it makes the oil industry, which the country still relies on, heavily clean up.

There's dangers, there's concerns in every project in every kind of industry, But if you're mitigating those is worth that risk to supply jobs to people that need them.

Rick Garcia is president of the local chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens or LULAK, the largest and oldest Hispanic organization in the United States.

Rick is retired now, but for decades he worked in the oil industry as an environmental consultant.

For him, the oil industry means employment.

The fact that carbon capture keeps oil and gas going in California, we're happy for that because we see the benefits to the communities as far as jobs go.

Even of temporary Rick said.

See the carbon Terravault one project at the center of the story is expected to create only about ten permanent positions and around eighty separate temporary construction at the start.

According to government data, only three percent of jobs in Cerrent County are directly related to oil and gas companies.

That's about thirteen hundred people, and just under half of those positions are held by Latinos.

There's many examples just right here in Button Willow of kids from that came from farm labor backgrounds and they were able to establish themselves, you know, either in solar projects or wind or oil and gas, and we view this carbon capture is another avenue for those type of jobs.

Not everyone agrees that carbon capture is a generator of green jobs.

It had been built as a climate solution, but this is truly at its core and oil production subsidy.

This is Maggie Coulter.

She's a senior attorney at the Climate Law Institute at the Center for Biological Diversity.

Maggie takes issue at the way the federal government has been promoting carbon capture and storage through a tax credit called forty five Q.

I know this is starting to sound like an episode of severance, but stay with me.

With forty five Q, private companies get a tax break when they take CO two and store it underground.

But for Maggie, the problem is that no one's actually checking that the CO two is really being put away.

They're relying on either the company submitting independent third party verification of the storage or a self certified verification that's submitted to the EPA.

The IRS relies on the Environmental Protection Agency for verification, but the EPA doesn't have a mandate to do an independent verification, so they simply don't do it.

So there's really no true verification of the actual sequestration.

It's a system based on trust, and that trust alone it doesn't always work.

A twenty twenty investigation by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found that almost a billion dollars had been improperly claimed under the forty five Q tax credit one billion dollars.

And nothing has changed in the reporting mechanism since that investigation.

And there's more.

Under the tax credit, companies can use the CO two.

They capture the CO two that they're supposed to turn into liquid and store safely underground for at least one hundred years, they can use that to actually pull more oil from the ground.

It's injected into an existing oil well and used as a surfactant to scrub out additional oil in what's calling enhanced oil recovery.

If you're confused, you're not alone.

It took me a second, Okay more than a second to process that the same carbon dioxide that these private companies are saying they're trapping to keep it away from us and getting massive tax credits and doing so, they're not actually getting rid of the carbon.

They're in fact using it to pump more oil.

Around eighty percent of the money claimed under this program has been used for enhanced oil recovery, or as Maggie plainly put it earlier, a subsidy for oil production.

The irony wasn't lost on California lawmakers, so in twenty twenty two, the state passed the law banning the use of carbon capture for enhanced oil recovery.

But Trump's One Big Beautiful Act expanded the forty five C credit so that companies can get more money if they use the COEO too, they capture specifically for enhanced oil recovery.

Why we're giving a tax credit for a production of a pollutant.

It's almost like a climate fraud.

There's no proof that any of this technology is actually benefiting our atmosphere.

Last year, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis estimated that taxpayers could be handing over eight hundred billion dollars to private oil companies under this tax credit.

That's almost three times California state budget for the next fiscal year.

Last October, the Kerrent County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved the permit for the Carbon Terable one project.

On favor or please guests your votes the motion has approved all eyes.

A few months later, the EPA also approved the project.

The permit allows the California Resources Corporation to inject CO two into the Elk Hills oil field for twenty six years before they can start the project.

The EPA required the company to seal two hundred wells where carbon dioxide is expected to migrate during the project, two hundred out of thousands of existing wells in that field.

We'll be right back.

Hey, we're back.

Here's producer Victory Estra with the rest of the story.

Since at least the nineteen sixties, oil and gas companies had known that burning fossil fuels contributes to climate change, but they work to keep this from the public.

They undermined the negative effects.

Instead went on a pr campaign to tout their environmental efforts, like this chevron ad from nineteen eighty five.

On the coast of California, Will big jets reach for the sky and one of the smallest endangered species quietly reaches for its dinner on land that's part of an oil refinery.

The video assumes in on a very small blue butterfly.

It looks like a cross between a nature video and tourism ad.

People who work there protect the area and plant buckwet.

Fast forward to today, and oil companies are evolving their campaigns, from explicit denial of the science of climate change to misleading information about their commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

This was a finding in a twenty twenty four report that came out of a three year investigation by Democratic staff of the House Oversight Committee and the Senate Budget Committee.

The report was called Denial, Disinformation, and doublespeak Big Oil's evolving efforts to avoid accountability for climate change.

The report says that oil companies are presenting carbon capture to the public as a viable solution to greenhouse gas emissions without acknowledging all of the issues with the technology.

These private oil companies are forking up huge sums of money for extensive media campaigns promoting this technology.

The wor all needs ways to reduce carbon emissions.

We are working on solutions in our own operations, like carbon capture.

While this is our front facing stance.

The report shows that behind closed doors, companies talk about carbon capture as a way to prolong the use of fossil fuels.

They also recognize that it's costly to scale.

Internal documents subpoenut by Congress show oil companies aren't willing to invest in the technology to actually make this a climate solution, and instead are pursuing taxpayer dollars for these projects, even though in recent years fossil fuel companies have reported tens of billions of dollars in record profits.

After the incident in Satarsha, Mississippi, California put in place a partial moratorium on CO two pipeline construction until new federal guidelines were published.

For now, California Resources Corporation, the company behind the carbon project in the Central Valley, can only build pipelines to transport CO two within their own property.

But after the Trump administration didn't allow for new regulations, there's been pressure on the state Congress to lift the moratorium.

We feel that momentum is there and the moratorium should be lifted later this year.

This is audio from an earnings call of the California Resources Corporation.

So once that unlocks, then the ability to talk about a meters, to be able to talk about the business model is going to start.

Crystallizing a lot more.

But we need that physical connectivity that comes with two pipelines being approved.

Right now, there are fifteen carbon capture plants already operating in a handful of states, in the US, including Texas and Wyoming, but so far the results are not impressive.

These facilities only capture less than half of one percent of the country's total emissions.

Here in the Central Valley.

It's kind of a sacrifice zone for the rest of California.

This is says that again with the nonprofit Central California Environmental Justice Network, a coalition of organizations including CESSAS, sued Current County over the recent permits.

It's always in the Central Valley.

It's always in the rural communities.

It's always where they see so little value in the lives of the people that live inside those communities to say, hey, you know what, we should make sure that something safe and find better alternatives before we treat you like guinea pigs.

The question lingers whether carbon capture and storage is an effective way to deal with the climate crisis.

A study of these projects from around the world has shown that most of them can be considered failures, either because they significantly underperform in their CO two capture goals or because they shut down after a few years of operation.

People kind of feel like, well, we're being treated like a dump, right, That's why is it that they have to put it underneath us.

Why wouldn't they put this in richer neighborhoods.

We reached out to the current county Planning and Natural Resources Department for this story, and they reply that they don't comment on projects that are in litigation.

The EPA, for its part, said that they only review whether a project in dangers under ground sources of drinking water.

Anything else is outside of their scope.

The California Resources Corporation didn't reply to our request for comment for the story.

At one of the public hearings that were held last year to discuss the Carbon Terrible One project in Kerrent County, there was a lot of debate about the possible jobs and tax revenue this could create versus the dangers and uncertainty of carbon capture.

This project is focused on improving the environment.

I already have in my family.

Children work cancert with asthma, even congenital.

There'll be jobs that last for years and years.

I understand the need for work, but enough is enough.

Between all the back and forth, a young community member made his way up to the podium, and that really put things into perspective.

I want this to happen because us.

It's scary because oh, that's why you cannot breathe and you can maybe pass or setting.

So we don't want that happen.

We just don't want that happen because we won't all want to stay here.

Unwittingly, that kid may have spoken on behalf of his future children or grandchildren.

We won't be here to see all of the consequences of the decisions made today trying to address the climate crisis, but they surely will.

This episode was produced by Victoria Strada.

It was edited by Andrea Lopez Cruzado.

It was mixed by Julia Caruso.

Fact checking for this episode by Roxanna Aguire.

Fernando Echavari is our managing editor.

The Latino USA team also includes Jessica Ellis Rinaldo, Leanoz Junior, Stephanie Lebau, Luis Luna Biori, mar Marquez, Julieta Martinelli, Marta Martinez, Monica Morales, Garcia, JJ Carubin, and Nancy Trujillo.

Our intern is Diego Perdomo, Benni Leamres and I are co executive producers and I'm your host Mariano JSA.

Latino USA is part of Iheart's Michael Dura Podcast Network.

Executive producers at iHeart are Leo Gomez and Arlene Santana.

Join us again on our next episode.

In the meantime, I'll see you on all of our social media and remember Gerido Guerida.

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