November 2023 Explosion And Three-Day Fire At NM "Carbon Capture" Site Didn't Stop Millions In Tax Credits

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Fire at the Piñon Midstream Dark Horse carbon capture project in Jal, NM, on November 25, 2023. Credit: New Mexico Environment Department

The trouble began at Piñon Midstream’s Dark Horse Treating Plant in Jal, New Mexico, on November 25, 2023, with an unexpected loud “pop” in the early afternoon, the company would later tell state regulators. A poisonous mix of flammable gasses hissed out from a pipeline feeding into the plant. Within a minute, a worker radioed in to the plant’s control room that a dense cloud of vapor had enveloped part of the plant. Within two minutes, Dark Horse was ablaze in what the company would later call an “intense and sustained fire.” Within 15 minutes, more pipes ripped open, and a towering fireball tore through the plant. Black plumes of smoke streamed over the desert and the Permian Basin shale below. An onlooker swore in Spanish as the fireball expanded across the sky, one anonymous video posted on Instagram shows. A second burst of flames erupted after dark as the fire burned on. It was two days before the first Piñon workers, wearing firefighter-style air tanks, could approach the plant’s perimeter. It was another day before the fire was fully extinguished.

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The fuel feeding into Dark Horse on the day of the explosion was a particularly dangerous mix, made up of methane gas, carbon dioxide (CO2), other fossil fuels, and poisonous hydrogen sulfide (H2S) gas — a toxic blend that oil companies nicknamed “sour gas” and “acid gas” due to the sulfur-like odor of hydrogen sulfide and CO2’s ability to acidify water. Dark Horse is designed to remove and dispose of the hydrogen sulfide and carbon dioxide contaminants so the rest of the gas can be sold. The company markets itself as the largest such project in New Mexico.

Dark Horse’s anchor shipper is Ameredev II, a private-equity backed driller that’s one of New Mexico’s top 25 oil producers. In June, Matador Resources (NYSE:MTDR) announced plans to acquire Ameredev II for $1.9 billion in cash. As that deal was announced, Matador management acknowledged Ameredev II’s oil production saw disruptions at the end of 2023 due to “issues” at Piñon. State production data shows Ameredev II’s New Mexico oil production abruptly dropped by over 400,000 barrels a month in the Dark Horse fire’s aftermath — a roughly 80 percent dive.

That’s enough oil to create roughly 18 times as much climate-altering CO2 pollution as the plant would have captured if it was up and running, a review of company filings and EPA emissions data by DeSmog finds. This summer, just seven months after the fire ripped through Dark Horse, the EPA approved a key “monitoring, reporting, and verification” plan for the project — a key step in enabling the company to claim carbon capture tax credits that could be worth over a quarter of a billion dollars.

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https://www.desmog.com/2024/08/13/pinon-dark-horse-fire-carbon-capture-reveals-how-oil-industry-environmental-solution-spurs-climate-crisis/

[2naSalit]

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Isn't impunity fun?