Public Service Commission discusses carbon capture facility planned for Calcasieu Parish

BATON ROUGE, La. (KPLC) - Carbon capture technology is under scrutiny by the Louisiana Public Service Commission.

Today in Baton Rouge, commissioners reviewed plans for a capture facility in Calcasieu Parish.

The billion-dollar Project Cypress, partially funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, could break ground as early as 2024. The technology aims to remove carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere via chemical reactions.

”It’s a new procedure – we want to make sure it’s done correctly,” Commissioner Foster Campbell (D-Shreveport) said. “It’s not really expensive to the ratepayers. There’s two big companies doing it, and they’re getting about $600 million from the federal government, and I just want to make sure that the taxpayers that are paying for this are protected.”

“There’s a lot of push coming forward about carbon capture, and we’re trying to get a better understanding of what regulations there needs to be around that, the safety investigations, the cost impact on the ratepayers,” Commissioner Craig Greene, M.D. (R-Baton Rouge) said. “It’s good for the environment, but it could be good for ratepayers, it could be good for landowners, it could be good all around. Just trying to find the win-win-win.”

The level of the PSC’s oversight of the proposed plant and future carbon capture facilities is still unclear.

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