A plan to store carbon dioxide in underground voids deep within a huge swath of Southwest Wyoming was approved Wednesday by the Bureau of Land Management.
Moxa Carbon Storage was granted a subsurface right-of-way for part of its Southwest Wyoming Carbon Dioxide Sequestration Project.
The Kansas-based Moxa Carbon Storage is owned by Tallgrass Energy Partners, which is now authorized to explore about 605,100 acres of federal subsurface “pore space” as a potential site for permanent storage of carbon dioxide beneath Lincoln, Sweetwater and Uinta counties.
Conservation groups continue to oppose the project, pointing out there remain more questions than answers about what the recent project approval by the BLM means for Wyoming wildlife, groundwater and taxpayer expense.
The Wednesday approval by the BLM does not authorize “surface-disturbing activities.” The next step is for Moxa-Tallgrass to apply for underground injection control well permits through the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality, which regulates the construction and operation of carbon dioxide injection wells.
Where those wells will be located, how they will enter the ground and who will benefit from future storage of CO2 are to be determined. No one is confirming where the CO2 will come from or how it will get there, but there is now a lot of pore space reserved for a Kansas City pipeline company.
The underground land mass approved for the project covers the equivalent of more than 6,000 football fields.
The approved area sits between Kemmerer and Granger extending north to around the Fontenelle Reservoir and south past Lyman and Mountain View to the Utah border.
Tallgrass Energy Partners
With operations in Kansas City and Lakewood, Colorado, Tallgrass Energy Partners and its Moxa Carbon Storage unit did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Listed media contacts provided by the BLM either declined comment or did not return messages from Cowboy State Daily. The one BLM representative available to comment said she was too new on the job to be of much help.
In the public record compiled by the BLM, Tallgrass Energy Partners spells out its vision for the investments it is making in Southwest Wyoming.
“Once completed, the Southwestern Wyoming project may be able to permanently sequester up to an estimated total of 600 million metric tons of CO2 over its predicted 30-year injection horizon,” wrote Cody Wagoner, director of land-subsurface and new ventures for Tallgrass Energy in a letter to the BLM in April of 2024.
“By way of comparison,” wrote Wagoner, “The project’s estimated annual sequestration of 20 million metric tons is equivalent to annual emissions from more than 4.7 million gasoline-powered passenger vehicles.”
In the BLM’s Environmental Assessment for the pore space, the agency acknowledged Moxa-Tallgrass’s potential future plans.
“Should Moxa Carbon eventually seek BLM authorization to construct and use surface infrastructure on BLM-administered public lands.. the pore space.. is the ‘first step in a larger project,’” according to the EA from July 2024. “That will consist of CO2 capture infrastructure at planned ammonia production facilities and other potential CO2 source points, CO2 compression and pumps, a CO2 pipeline, and sequestration surface facilities.”
Once the details of the larger sequestration project are finalized by Moxa-Tallgrass, it will submit a new request for the use of specific federal surface lands through a separate application.
Immaculately Injected
A future application might fill in the blanks for a project that identifies storage space underground on public land, but doesn’t spell out how it will be used.
“Never before have I seen a proposal for a permit that is only for the pore? space,” Victoria Bogdan Tejeda, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute, told Cowboy State Daily Thursday.
Bogdan Tejeda said the BLM essentially approved “an immaculate injection” of CO2 captured in the future.
“It’s a bit tongue in cheek. It's a bit of a joke, right?” said Bogdan Tejeda. “To act as if they can approve a project for CO2 appearing underground without saying how it actually got there.”
Bogdan Tejeda said there’s a federal tax credit that pays per ton of CO2 injected.
“Again, we don't know where the CO2 is coming from, but presumably Moxa, as the injection site, will get paid money for every ton of CO2 that they put into the ground. And so that is a subsidy that's coming to them,” said Bogdan Tejeda. She described the use of public lands as an additional subsidy to Moxa-Tallgrass.
“This is a bad deal,” she said.
The Natural Resources Defense Council also opposed the Moxa-Tallgrass pore space approval.
The NRDC pointed out to Moxa-Tallgrass and the BLM that the project was broken into separate pieces in order to avoid discussion about the full scope of foreseeable project impacts.
“The concern here is that an agency can then avoid more detailed environmental analysis because segmentation essentially allows the agency to ‘hide’ the full scope of potential environmental impacts should the project actually be built,” Josh Axelrod, senior policy advocate for the NRDC, told Cowboy State Daily on Thursday.
David Madison can be reached at david@cowboystatedaily.com.
