Tenaska updates Liberty County on Tiny Woods carbon-capture project; court takes no action

Jesse Freeman, director of development for Tenaska, told the Liberty County Commissioners Court that the company has advanced leasing and permitting steps for the Tiny Woods Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) Hub and expects construction at the earliest in the middle to end of next year if permits are granted.

Freeman said the project team has completed most land leases in the project footprint — “probably around 50 to 60 families” — and has submitted permit applications to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Texas Railroad Commission and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. He told the court those reviews are ongoing and said he expects the permitting process to move “in the right direction” with approvals possible by the end of the year, and construction following thereafter.

The presentation emphasized project scale and surface impacts. Freeman said the company’s permit modeling lists a maximum possible subsurface “plume” extent of roughly 20,000 acres over a 30-year lifecycle, while the surface footprint for wells and monitoring is small — about 10 acres for injection and monitoring infrastructure. “We roughly use about 10 acres on the surface,” Freeman said, adding that most activity is thousands of feet underground.

Freeman described the basic operation: capture carbon dioxide from industrial stacks, transport it by pipeline and inject it for long-term storage underground. “Carbon capture… takes carbon dioxide out of the air. It leads to cleaner air and it stores it back underground where it originally started,” Freeman said. He explained Tenaska’s role as the company that builds and operates the sequestration field and pipeline and said the business model is to be paid by emitters on a per‑ton basis to store CO2.

On safety and engineering, Freeman described the three geological requirements regulators review: porosity, permeability and a competent cap rock to seal injected CO2. He said the company has completed seismic and modeling work and that the regulatory review requires engineering and financial assurance before construction can start. “As part of our submittal to the Railroad Commission and the EPA, we have to put our money where our mouth is,” Freeman said, noting bonds and insurance would be posted before ground disturbance.

Freeman also summarized results from an economic-impact study Tenaska commissioned: he cited local tax benefits approaching $279 million and said the study’s job-metric equals about 300 jobs over the life of the project (the study reported roughly 10,000 “job-years,” which the presenter translated to about 300 permanent or equivalent jobs). He described those benefits as flowing to local landowners through lease payments and to the local economy via construction and supplies.

Technical details discussed during questions included pipeline size and pressure and the purity of captured CO2. Freeman said the project anticipates a trunk pipeline roughly 16 inches in diameter with smaller laterals near customers (about 12 inches), CO2 purity “in the high 90s,” and transport pressures “1,500-ish.” He acknowledged the numbers vary by final engineering and said the company can provide specific engineering figures when available.

Freeman said Tenaska plans continued community outreach and expected a public meeting coordinated by the Railroad Commission and EPA in late spring to discuss the permit application; Tenaska’s local public-relations team and office will also hold community meetings. After the presentation, the court made and carried a motion to “take no action” on the informational presentation.

Ending: Tenaska left copies of the economic-impact study and contact information for local outreach. The company said it will return to brief the court again as permitting and land-leasing progress continues.