Dear Councilmembers,

We urge you to pass a resolution voicing our community’s concerns and opposition to the proposed Montezuma NorCal Carbon Hub project, which would drill a dangerous and counterproductive carbon injection well near Solano County's Montezuma wetlands. The project threatens the health and safety of our community, as well as cities and ecosystems throughout the Bay Area. Please call on the Environmental Protection Agency’s Region 9 office to deny the permit for this project.

Montezuma LLC's massive proposed carbon capture and storage project would directly impact both Contra Costa and Solano counties. The developers want to drill a carbon injection well near Collinsville in Solano County, adjacent to ecologically sensitive wetlands in the San Francisco Bay Area Delta. The impact zone of this injection would spread beyond the injection site, across the Carquinez Strait, and likely into Contra Costa County near Antioch. They plan to source carbon waste from refineries and power plants across the East Bay and transport it by a lengthy — potentially underwater — carbon dioxide pipeline network to the injection site.

CO2 pipelines are highly dangerous and pose significant risks to our communities, wetlands habitats and wildlife. Because compressed CO2 is denser than oxygen, pipeline leaks can displace the air we (and wildlife) breathe and cause difficulty breathing, seizures, loss of consciousness, and sometimes death. CO2 pipelines are also under-regulated, difficult to construct, and hard to protect from leaks. Any presence of water in a pipeline creates a corrosive acid that leads to “zipper” fractures and can cause the pipeline to rupture along its entire length. Building a massive network of CO2 pipelines in the seismically active Bay Area will increase the risk of dangerous CO2 leaks that could spread to nearby communities and harm ecosystems.

Many of the towns and cities that would be impacted by the project are designated as “disadvantaged” by the California EPA because they are within the top 25% of communities with highest rates of exposure to pollution. Even if the project were able to capture the amount of carbon it promises to, which is highly improbable, carbon capture technology doesn’t stop other pollutants from escaping the smokestack and harming people’s health and the environment. As such, capturing carbon from refineries and power plants will prolong exposure to pollutants from those facilities, harming communities that are already overburdened by air pollution in Solano and Contra Costa counties.

Carbon capture and storage isn’t a credible solution to mitigate fossil fuel emissions. Harvard Public Health compared it to filters on cigarettes: a false “fix” that does not address the underlying harms. It’s a flawed and inefficient technology that has repeatedly overpromised and underdelivered. There’s no example of an industrial-scale project capturing anything close to the amount of carbon the Montezuma NorCal Carbon Hub's project developers have promised. Moreover, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), carbon capture is not even necessary to meet our climate goals.

More than 85 local and national environmental justice, climate, health, faith, and conservation organizations have united in opposition to the Montezuma Project. The Montezuma Carbon Hub proposal is an expensive, unjust and dangerous distraction from real climate solutions like rapidly phasing out fossil fuels and transitioning to renewable energy.

Councilmembers, please help protect the health and safety of our community and local environment by passing a resolution that voices our community’s concerns and urges EPA Region 9 to reject the project’s permit.

CC:
Martha Guzman, EPA Regional Administrator, Region 9
David Albright, EPA Region 9 Groundwater Protection Section Manager
Emily Pimentel, EPA Region 9 Carbon Capture & Sequestration Policy Advisor
Solano County Board of Supervisors’ Clerk of the Board