CCS Alliance 2023 Year-in-Review
2023 was a memorable year for the Houston CCS Alliance. From our series of engaging community roundtables to our tree planting and park improvement event with Commissioner Adrian Garcia, the Houston CCS Alliance directly engaged with dozens of groups throughout the Houston region, helping inform and build awareness about carbon capture and storage and the promise it holds for Houston and the surrounding Gulf Coast.
From June through December, we partnered with local community organizations to host roundtables in Chambers and Jefferson Counties, Baytown, Beaumont, Port Arthur, and Pasadena, engaging directly with local officials and community members to educate them on both what CCS is and what it has the power to do for the Gulf Coast region. Representatives from our member companies along with subject matter experts like the University of Houston’s Dr. Ramanan Krishnamoorti, were active participants, discussing the science behind CCS and explaining their respective roles in making carbon capture a reality. You can check out 12NewsNow’s coverage of our roundtable in Beaumont to learn more about our outreach and hear what some of the attendees learned.
Along with hosting events, the Houston CCS Alliance was an active participant in additional events hosted by other organizations, including community advisory councils in Deer Park, Pasadena, and La Porte, the Greater Houston Partnership, Deer Park Chamber of Commerce, among others.
We also partnered with the University of Houston for STEM Zone Saturday, an all-day event where more than 80 children from surrounding neighborhoods learned about carbon capture and storage through insightful guest speakers like Ed Washburn, an Earth Scientist at Chevron, and hands-on experiments coordinated by the Houston CCS Alliance and Space Center Houston.
In other STEM-related happenings, we joined the Greater Houston Women’s Chamber of Commerce for a podcast highlighting women in STEM, featuring member company representatives Lianne Armpriester, from Chevron, and Carrie Lalou from Linde.
Finally, we had the opportunity to give back to the community through our flagship tree planting and park improvement event, hosted in conjunction with Precinct 2 and County Commissioner Adrian Garcia. With the help of more than 50 volunteers from our member companies, we planted 400 trees at Partnership Park in Pasadena, helping beautify a treasured community resource that was devastated by a tornado earlier in the year. Commissioner Garcia even recognized the Houston CCS Alliance with a proclamation, commending our direct engagement with local communities and our efforts to raise awareness about carbon capture and storage technology throughout the Houston area.
2023 also saw exciting improvements to the Alliance’s digital content. Our team significantly expanded access to Spanish language materials throughout our print and digital resources, and we also rolled out our first newsletter written in Spanish. All of these resources help make carbon capture easier to understand for the Greater Houston community.
This year, we made meaningful strides toward increasing awareness of carbon capture and storage and the many economic and environmental impacts it can have on the Houston region. We look forward to hosting even more events, further expanding our outreach, and continuing to advocate for the expansion of CCS in the Gulf Coast Region in 2024!
