One day, while surfing the web for information relating to green energy, I stumbled onto the fact that Oklahoma has the largest carbon capture plant in the United States and the second largest in the world.
Immediately, I contacted friends in Osage county – where the plant is located – and no one I spoke with knew anything about it at all; from long-time politically active folks who get around in their community regularly, to the two County Commissioners I spoke with, to the outgoing Sheriff, to the county clerk. NO ONE had any idea that the LARGEST CARBON CAPTURE PLANT IN THE NATION was right down the road in Shidler off an old oil company road.
Interestingly, neither the Corporation Commission nor DEQ knew much about it either according to the employees I spoke with and neither one of them knew who regulated the site to keep Oklahomans safe from accidental discharge of CO2 (which has injured people in Satartia, Mississippi).
This all makes complete sense when reading a Senator Dave Rader-authored bill that passed through the Energy Committee this session to give the Corporation Commission jurisdiction over carbon capture facilities. So who’s monitoring the CO2 capture facility now? Does our Governor just do these deals on his own and not worry one little bit about the safety or security of Oklahomans? It surely seems that, in Oklahoma, it’s the ‘green’ energy wild west where everything goes so long as we’ve got an “all of the above” energy policy to push forward.
In fact, I only learned anything about the facility at all because I found a video of Governor Stitt excitedly congratulating the company Heimdal for the creation of the carbon capture plant, ‘Bantam’, on Heimdal’s LinkdIn page. Heimdal is the brainchild of a 30-something named, Marcus Lima – a chemist from Norway.
Lima created Heimdal’s carbon capture technology through Y Combinator in 2021, specifically to take advantage of green energy handouts such as the IRA’s $180 per ton credit of CO2 that is captured and stored through at least 2032. Yes, you read that right. He started the process SPECIFICALLY to get the ‘free’ money.
Heimdal is backed by Sam Altman – another 30-something who assumed control of Open AI after Elon Musk stepped down, took it public and then got fired. He and his husband just recently had a baby.
After my article about Oklahoma’s carbon capture fame came out in the Federalist, a post on Marcus Lima’s LinkdIn page, caught me by surprise
These remarks were made after he read a serious article in a national online magazine.
Because I’m me, I commented on the post:
Not long after I posted this, I received a reply in my message box from Lima:
Either he’s a very considerate European, or someone suggested he respond to me and then delete the post. Either way, the original post has been deleted from his LinkdIn page. Note that in his response he mentions only the Native American populations. What about the ‘regular’ folk? Again, no one I spoke to knew anyone who knew anything about this ‘groundbreaking’ plant. This is telling.
I noted that in his post he lists his “fellow secretive luminaries” as Kevin Stitt, Scott M, Victoria Tran, John Podesta and James Lankford. We know Stitt, Scott M. is either Scott Mueller (briefly Secretary of Commerce and Workforce Development, who now works for Goldman Sachs), or Scott Mitchell (an Oklahoma broadcaster). Victoria Tran was the Deputy Secretary of Oklahoma Secretary of Energy & Environment at some point, but I can’t find her listed in that position any more. John Podesta is the creepy democrat political operative who’s worked for everyone from the Clintons to the Obamas and who served as Senior Advisor to President Biden for International Climate Policy from 2024 to 2025 after which he became the Chair of the leftist Center for American Progress. Then, of course, there’s our liberal Republican Senator Lankford, who has a lovely picture with Lima still up on Lima’s LinkdIn page.
He also has a photo of himself with the AG – “We discussed CLass VI well permitting and primacy for the State of Oklahoma, as well as Heimdal plans for DAC facilities in the State, with the launch of Bantam, as well as our expansion plans. It’s clear direct air capture (DAC) and carbon management broadly has an ambitious future and home in Oklahoma.”
I’m not sure what the AG has to do with any of that, but this was upsetting. He wants MORE Direct Air Capture (DAC) facilities in Oklahoma. Why? This has nothing to do with oil and gas exploration (although there is experimentation with injecting liquid CO2 into old wells as a way of fracking out new oil, instead of using salt water). This has everything to do with carbon credits and ‘sequestering’ CO2. In fact, in an article posted to Heimdal’s website but released by Bloomberg News, Lima says, “The world must cut greenhouse gas emissions as quickly as possible, and research shows reducing the use of fossil fuels is the fastest way to do so.”
Why in the world are we chasing after DAC technology in Oklahoma? This is the entire basis for the Carbon Credit scheme and the Green New Deal. This should be upsetting I would think – especially to REPUBLICANS as this whole thing is just a way to usher in a new economy based entirely on NOTHING. This whole technology is about nothing more than investors creating investment projects to make themselves more money.
Under the Biden administration and the IRA, these kinds of projects were not only ideologically ‘funded’, but funded with billions of our tax dollars as well.
We know that President Trump has said he hates wind turbines and that he’s not inclined to continue IRA subsidies, but then we have Governor Stitt giving an interview to POLITICO where he says that he’s asking the President to continue the subsidies to keep the green energy projects funded we already have going here in the state.
We can almost forgive the Altman’s and Lima’s – as Rush Limbaugh is quoted as saying, “If you’re not a liberal at twenty, you have no heart; if you’re not a conservative at forty, you have no brain.” But our Governor should be expected to DO better – if not KNOW better – if not for his age, but for the fact that he should have advisors to dispense topical thoughts and a pulse on his constituency, listening to their desires. Yet he doesn’t. He rules Oklahoma like a King – on his own with advisors he picks himself and changes depending upon whether or not he likes what they have to say – look at the State School Board, the Oklahoma Health Care Authority, his Energy and Environmental Secretary and the Oklahoma Veterans Commission – and these are but a few examples. This history does not at all indicate an affinity for Oklahomans, but a myopic, self-centered, elitist view of governing that can only acknowledge his constituency as “the little people”.
Here in Oklahoma, the only ones crying out about the continued shoving of the Green Agenda down our throats in a Red State are the CONSERVATIVE little people; land owners and rural people effected by CO2 pipelines that can break and discharge their deadly gas onto their livestock and families – farmers whose land can become ruined from the oil and fiberglass thrown down to the soil by fractured wind turbines – communities whose farmland is being usurped for huge solar panel installations that seed the ground with glass and toxic chemicals should they catch fire or be damaged by hail or a tornado, preventing local food from ever being grown there again.
Unfortunately, Oklahomans have tended to love these authoritarian types of Republican Governors, we can only hope to learn from our history and be wiser in 2026.
