After fighting oil, gas and petrochemical expansion in southwest Louisiana for more than 50 years, retired biologist Michael Tritico might be expected to applaud a new facility that promises to suck carbon dioxide out of the air to reduce global warming. 

But that’s not how Tritico sees the U.S. Department of Energy-backed direct air capture facilities proposed for Calcasieu and Caddo parishes.

“The political locking-in of Southwest Louisiana as a fossil fuel centerpiece has taken on a new facet — carbon capture and sequestration,” Tritico said of the facilities, collectively called Project Cypress, announced last year. 

His concerns haven’t diminished since that announcement. Tritico was one of the few residents who attended a DOE environmental scoping meeting for the project Nov. 21 in Vinton, where one of the two parts of the project would be sited. Another meeting was held a day earlier in Shreveport, close to the other location for the sprawling $1 billion project. 

Unlike technology on industrial facilities that captures carbon from a plant’s emissions, direct air capture (DAC) sucks in ambient air and uses chemicals and heat, among other means, to extract carbon dioxide from it. 

Critics say the technology is too expensive and energy-intensive to make a sizable dent in carbon concentrations. While carbon emissions from a coal-fired power plant can contain up to 15% carbon dioxide, the atmosphere contains just .04% carbon. 

Tritico’s greatest worry is that the pipeline carrying carbon dioxide captured from the air in Calcasieu Parish and Shreveport to central Louisiana — where it would be injected underground — could leak or rupture. That would displace the oxygen in the air, threatening the lives of people who live along the pipelines. He thinks, though, another argument might have more weight with the incoming Trump administration — that Project Cypress is a waste of money.

“Millions of dollars in taxpayer money for what amounts to an experiment,” he said after giving his comments to the DOE meeting. “That’s going to be interesting to see under this new administration, if they’re really serious about saving taxpayer money — because this is a good example. Hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money for something that’s quite likely inefficient.”

A new paper from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Energy Initiative echoes that conclusion. It warns that it would take 40% of the world’s electricity to remove one-fourth of the carbon emitted each year — and that the technology is unlikely to be a major solution to climate change.

The research team recommended, however, that “work to develop the DAC technology continue so that it’s ready to help with the energy transition — even if it’s not the silver bullet that solves the world’s decarbonization challenge.”

Trump has repeatedly vowed to slash climate spending under the Inflation Reduction Act, but the direct air capture hubs are part of the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Act. The IRA, however, does provide a $180 per ton of carbon subsidy for direct air capture that Project Cypress would apply for once operational.