AI Data Centers May Have A New Rival In Terms Of Public Hatred And Distrust - "Carbon Capture" Projects

[hatrack]

The plan to bury carbon under remote Indiana farmland is supposed to be a slam dunk for the climate, according to its supporters – all generously funded by US tax dollars. But as far as Melissa Harrison and some other residents of Clymers, Indiana, are concerned, it just might be the end of their town. “This is our place,” she says. Generations of her family are buried in the cemetery, and she is raising her five grandchildren in one of several dozen white-clapboard homes among corn fields and industrial plants serving the farming industry.

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Harrison said the town of Clymers is already overburdened by hazards from industrial agriculture facilities including a fertilizer supplier, a hazardous waste recycling company and the giant ethanol plant that is proposing the project. She said the community faces contaminated well water, a lack of sewage facilities and high poverty rates. Warmly remembered as once having been a thriving “heartland” community with a beautiful white church, two grocery stores, a Chevy dealer and a diner, the town is now struggling. Its school is closed; the old Methodist church has been demolished and the playground is surrounded by fertilizer tanks on trailers, which the fertilizer company rents to nearby farms. Harrison, like other residents in the area, received a letter about the project. Some were asked to accept $150 a year in exchange for having the carbon sink under their properties.“If they make Clymers bad enough that no one wants to live here, they can take over the whole town, real cheap,” she said.

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In 2024, the nation’s first commercial carbon capture project, under a lake that provides drinking water for large parts of central Illinois, developed two leaks. The state subsequently banned new CCS projects under one of the state’s biggest aquifers. In 2020, a pipeline carrying carbon dioxide ruptured in rural Mississippi, creating a mass poisoning that resulted in 45 people being hospitalized and 200 evacuated. Emergency responders found people lying on the ground unable to breathe and didn’t know what was happening. “It looked like you were going through the zombie apocalypse,” Jack Willingham, emergency director for the affected county, told NPR.

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Charles Harvey, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT, helped to start one of the world’s first companies devoted to sequestering carbon to prevent global heating in the early 2000s. But since then, he has become a staunch opponent of the strategy, and acknowledged experiencing guilt akin to what J Robert Oppenheimer felt over inventing the atomic bomb. “It’s just the stupidest way to reduce emissions,” said Harvey. Oil companies are lobbying hard for the projects, he said, but he believes CO2 emissions could be best tackled if the money was spent on renewable energy.“ It is loved by the industry because it’s a subsidy for whatever they’re already doing,” he said.

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/12/carbon-sequestration-projects-oil-companies-subsidies

[NNadir]

1. The difference of course, is that data centers are real and "carbon capture and storage" isn't. Like hydrogen...

..."carbon capture and storage" - the two are sometimes coupled in nonsensical rhetoric - is just fossil fuel greenwashing.

On the other hand, carbon capture and utilization seems more serious, but the laws of thermodynamics require that such a scheme will require vast clean energy, and right now, clean sustainable energy accounts for less than 40 Exajoules out of around 650.