Lucid Energy Group Bags Milestone EPA Approval

Lucid Energy Group has announced that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has approved the company’s previously submitted monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) plan to sequester carbon dioxide from its Red Hills gas processing complex in Lea County, New Mexico.

The MRV plan documents Lucid Energy Group’s means of safely ensuring permanent carbon capture and storage of CO2 removed from the natural gas stream during the processing and treating of natural gas from its customers, the company noted. Following subsequent approval by the Internal Revenue Service, the plan will provide section 45Q tax credits for the sequestration and permanent storage of CO2 in Lucid Energy Group’s existing and permitted disposal wells, the company highlighted.

“Since our entry to the Delaware Basin five years ago, Lucid has targeted investments in large-scale gas treating assets, which empower our customers to develop highly economic drilling locations with associated off-spec gas,” Lucid Energy Group CEO Mike Latchem said in a company statement.

“This strategy has proven beneficial for all stakeholders, as Lucid currently removes more CO2 from Permian Basin shale production than any other midstream operator. In turn, Lucid is the perfect candidate to develop the largest CCS project in the Permian Basin by simply modifying and expanding our existing operations,” Latchem added in the statement.

“We are committed to finding safe, creative and effective ways to serve the growing needs of our customers while reducing our environmental footprint,” Latchem went on to say.

Lucid Energy Group is the largest privately held natural gas processor in the Permian Basin, according to its website, which outlines that its assets include 2,150 miles of gathering pipelines, 33 compressor stations, and 1.2 billion cubic feet per day of processing capacity. The Red Hills complex is said to comprise five plants with a combined 920 million cubic feet per day of capacity.

In March last year, Lucid Energy Group announced that it had commissioned its Red Hills V cryogenic processing plant in the Delaware Basin. The plant brought the total capacity of Lucid Energy Group’s natural gas processing franchise in the northern Delaware Basin to 1.2 billion cubic feet per day, the company outlined in a company statement at the time.

The EPA has been working for a cleaner, healthier environment for the American people since 1970, according to its website. The organization is led by Michael S. Regan, who was sworn in as the 16th administrator of the EPA on March 11, 2021.

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