The Ongoing Fight Against CCUS Development in Louisiana: Interview with Local Organizer, Kaitlyn Joshua

By Lew Daly

Last June, the industrial gases giant Air Products announced that it was shutting down its Louisiana Clean Energy Complex, a massive “blue ammonia” plant and flagship project for carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) development in Louisiana’s southeast industrial corridor known as “cancer alley.” As I described the situation in a recent blog post, the “LCEC collapse puts a dent in blue ammonia’s pollution load and contribution to cumulative impacts in Ascension Parish, but the rise of grassroots resistance in stopping the project is the most important development as communities face the growing threat of CCUS-adapted chemical and fuel production facilities in the region.” 

For a local perspective on this important development, I interviewed Kaitlyn Joshua, Senior Campaign Organizer for the Louisiana Gulf Coast at Earthworks and leader in the grassroots fight against CCUS and its associated fossil fuel and petrochemical dominion in South Louisiana. I have frequently consulted with Kaitlyn in my research and policy work on the CCUS buildout, and I wanted to get her insights on the LCEC collapse and her broader perspective on where the struggle goes from here. 

Could you share some of the background in your life and place that brought you into the work you do today?

Kaitlyn Joshua (KJ): I stumbled into environmental justice organizing after pursuing a career in medicine and realizing after college that it was not where I wanted to be. Eight years ago, I started working for a law firm and then married my husband from St. James Parish, Louisiana. He often spoke about the industrial pollution and buildout in his grandparents' neighborhood in the fifth district of St. James. That piqued my interest and led me to research “Cancer Alley.” As someone who grew up dealing with asthma attacks, I never knew the underlying factors that could cause it (such as industrial air pollution). In the fall of 2018, I was hired as Step Up Louisiana’s first organizer and later worked for the Power Coalition for Equity and Justice. Now, I’m at Earthworks, an environmental justice organization that supports frontline communities against petrochemical buildout. 

I also began dabbling at the intersection of environmental justice and reproductive healthcare after experiencing a devastating loss at eleven weeks pregnant. In Cancer Alley, miscarriages, preterm rates, and low birth weights are common occurrences. In parishes across Louisiana, the same populations near the built industrial environment also live in maternity care deserts, without nearby hospital systems, primary care providers, jobs, or grocery stores. The social determinants of health strongly indicate your quality of life in a state that constantly chooses industry over people. 

Until recently, CCUS has never achieved any real scale in the United States despite decades of federal support. Why do you think its development footprint has grown so much in the last several years? What do you make of the fact that, at least federally, it seems to get most of its support from Democrats? 

KJ: CCUS’s development footprint has grown because the Biden Administration touted it as a solution to the climate crisis. Politicians bought into the idea that we, as a nation, could prolong the lifeline of the declining oil and gas industry while also checking a box on climate change goals. If CCUS worked, I think we would all support the technology, but that is simply not the case. Additionally, the Inflation Reduction Act enhanced the 45Q tax credit, which further incentivized the CCUS buildout.

I believe Republicans are drawing hard lines in the sand around what they will and will not allow in regard to industrial buildout near their homes, where they work, and where their kids go to school. But for a myriad of reasons, lawmakers in the area are more concerned about lining their pockets, signing nondisclosure agreements, and personally benefiting from their relationship with industry.  For them, it is important to keep industry happy, and a lot of them are former plant workers themselves, so they come to the table under the influence of industrial bigwigs. 

I also want to point out that Democrats who represent areas of Ascension Parish, like Donaldsonville, St. John Parish, and St. James Parish, have been and tend to be staunchly in favor of industrial buildout and development. Republican lawmakers representing the more conservative, white, and affluent areas tend to be more mindful about industry near their homes or neighborhoods. It's ironic that the parties that typically don’t align with climate-friendly policy are the ones championing it.  

What is your basic analysis of CCUS as a purported climate solution, and how do you see it in the larger context of fossil fuel power and development in the region? 

KJ: While CCUS, in theory, sounds like a promising way to address the climate crisis, it is not a zero-emissions solution. Capturing, compressing, transporting, and storing carbon requires substantial energy, and that energy use can generate additional greenhouse-gas emissions. This raises an important question: instead of relying on increasingly complex technologies to capture emissions after they are produced, why not reduce emissions at the source whenever possible?

For many companies, however, reducing production can conflict with economic incentives. Producing less fossil fuel or other carbon-intensive products can mean lower revenues and potentially lower profits. In the broader context of the fossil-fuel industry, critics argue that CCUS can therefore function not only as a climate technology but also as a means of extending the useful life of existing fossil-fuel infrastructure and business models.

Ultimately, this creates tension between two approaches: reducing the amount of carbon-intensive production itself, or continuing that production while attempting to capture its associated emissions. CCUS offers a “both/and” approach—allowing society to pursue emissions reductions while maintaining some existing industrial activity. The central question is whether that approach can deliver sufficiently deep and durable emissions reductions, and at what economic and environmental cost.

Can you give us a thumbnail sketch of the current politics around CCUS in Louisiana? 

KJ: The politics surrounding CCUS in Louisiana can be best described as cross-cutting. It has united people beyond traditional political lines, along a more populist viewpoint. Many conservative voters are, rightfully so, mad at their elected representatives regarding CCUS.  They feel that their representatives aren't listening to their concerns about eminent domain and property rights. 

Were you surprised by the collapse of Air Products’ LCEC blue ammonia plant this past June? Some argue the project cancellation was caused predominantly by economics. How do you see it?

KJ: I was not surprised by the collapse of the Air Products blue ammonia plant. The writing was on the wall. The project faced significant opposition from community members, elected officials, and stakeholders. On top of that, the project quickly became seen as a financial risk for potential banks and investors. Quarterly finance reports and meetings clearly indicated that Air Products would not secure funding in time to build the plant, and the project was becoming too expensive to afford. 

Yet, a couple of months later you had the groundbreaking for a different blue ammonia complex, CF Industries Blue Point in Modeste, with Trump officials there to celebrate. What happens in your organizing and in your community when, at least for the moment, you can’t seem to stop something like this? 

KJ: It is certainly a minor setback when the community witnesses the success of one site fight only to face another site fight across the river.

The CF Industries expansion in Donaldsonville is a CCS initiative and part of a River Park Megaplex that will be situated within a large industrial corridor already experiencing severe cumulative pollution impacts.

Air Products’ defeat had the right amount of energy behind it: affluent white residents were angry about the prospect of living near an ammonia plant and about the plant using Lake Maurepas—an area where many fishermen and lake enthusiasts have already purchased retirement homes.

Donaldsonville, on the other hand, is an area of the state where many residents live below the poverty line and where communities are often underserved and overlooked. Yet elected officials and other stakeholders are not opposing the project. Instead, they are encouraging the community to support it as an economic development effort, despite concerns about the project’s potential impacts on the health and well-being of residents.

For more on the Air Products’ collapse, click here.

To learn more about the climate and community harms from the CCUS buildout, read my report here.