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Safety concerns are at the heart of opposition to a proposed carbon dioxide pipeline in central Illinois, which would connect an ethanol plant to a proposed sequestration site about six miles away.
The pipeline proposed by One Earth Energy is much shorter than carbon dioxide pipelines that were previously proposed in Illinois and then tabled by Navigator CO2 Ventures and Wolf Carbon Solutions. Those pipelines would have stretched through hundreds of miles of farmland.
But One Earth’s proposed pipeline starts just west of downtown Gibson City, at the company’s ethanol plant. Local leaders say county and city emergency responders, relying largely on volunteer firefighters, are ill-equipped to prepare for possible leaks or ruptures.
Ford County Emergency Management Agency and Local Emergency Planning Committee coordinator Terry Whitebird says the county cannot afford to do the necessary training and planning for a potential disaster and evacuation, as noted in testimony filed with the Illinois Commerce Commission, which will hold public hearings in May on the company’s request for a necessary certificate of authority.
It also cannot afford to buy electric municipal vehicles that could be necessary during a carbon dioxide leak, since gas and diesel vehicles can fail when the heavy gas displaces oxygen needed for combustion. That means ambulances and other emergency vehicles could be stalled just when they are needed to help rescue or evacuate residents.
Whitebird also noted that the local hospital has only eight patient rooms and one emergency physician on call, meaning it could be overwhelmed in case of a carbon dioxide leak. The next closest hospitals, in Bloomington and Champaign, are each 40 minutes away.
Opponents of carbon dioxide pipelines often point to a 2020 disaster in the tiny village of Satartia, Mississippi, where a Denbury Resources pipeline rupture and explosion left people sickened and struggling to breathe. At least 45 people were hospitalized, and some report lasting health impacts.
Whitebird envisioned a similar disaster unfolding in Gibson City, which has a much larger population of 3,400.
“The wind in this area is generally from west to east, and any leak or rupture will likely result in the CO2 gas drifting into Gibson City — a potential exposure of 25% of the population of the County,” says Whitebird’s testimony before the commerce commission.
Sally Lasser moved from Joliet, near Chicago, to cultivate forest and native prairie on land near Gibson City she named R Wildflower Farm & Fields, to honor her late father, Richard Lasser, who planted 5,000 trees on the land and put much of it in conservation easements.
One Earth’s proposed sequestration site is near Lasser’s land, and her name is on a list of affected landowners filed by the company. When Lasser first heard about the proposal, she was open to understanding the benefits to the local ethanol industry, and allowed the company to host a meeting on her porch last summer.
At first, “I was given no reason to be concerned about the danger of this project,” she said. She asked questions about truck traffic and lights during construction. Later on, other residents and advocates explained the risks of a carbon dioxide pipeline rupture.
“If I were to try to start my truck, it’s not going to start, so I’m going to take off on foot unless I have an electric car,” she said. “How do I know which direction to go in, because I can’t see (the carbon dioxide gas). Say the emergency responders have electric vehicles. Are they going to come to my farm and scour all 160 acres to find me? Are they going to look up in the loft of my barn because that’s where I was when I passed out from this?”
Local leaders and advocates have demanded that One Earth produce models of how a carbon dioxide plume would spread in case of a rupture, but pipeline developers are not required to do so. The company filed plume modeling with the commerce commission in late March, but it is considered confidential and can only be viewed by official stakeholders in the process.
Kathy Campbell, an audiologist and Southern Illinois University professor emeritus who has reviewed proposals for the Food and Drug Administration and other federal agencies, said she “had reservations” about the quality of the modeling.
Local leaders previously obtained modeling done by Navigator for its proposal, though the company never officially released that information. Campbell analyzed Navigator’s plume modeling to predict how a plume from One Earth’s pipeline might behave.
She concluded that residents closest to One Earth’s proposed pipeline would have no way to evacuate before being overcome by dangerous levels of carbon dioxide if the pipeline ruptured. Based on Navigator’s modeling, residents within 1,971 feet of the One Earth pipeline would be in the highest hazard zone, Campbell testified. One Earth’s proposal shows multiple residences and businesses within 1,200 feet of the pipeline, and at least two residences less than 700 feet away, based on GIS analysis by pipeline opponents.
While carbon dioxide at low concentrations is harmless to humans, at higher concentrations, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and U.S. Department of Agriculture consider it a serious health hazard, both because of its toxicity and the fact that it displaces oxygen at ground level.
In a March 27 filing, One Earth promised that it would provide carbon dioxide monitors and emergency oxygen supplies to landowners along the route.
“Imagine if everyone along a pipeline corridor had to have oxygen, and know how to use it,” said Jenny Cassel, a senior attorney for Earthjustice who has worked on proposed state legislation to regulate such pipelines. “That’s pretty terrifying. What if a kid is home alone?”
Carbon dioxide is gaseous under normal atmospheric conditions, but can be turned to liquid at high pressure, for transport in pipelines. If that pressure is suddenly released, carbon dioxide converts to its solid state and takes on a frigid temperature, then evaporates or “melts” into gas.
“If there’s a rupture, it immediately turns into dry ice crystals — it comes out at negative 109 degrees,” explained Campbell, who lived in the path of the Navigator pipeline proposal. “If you breathe those or those hit your eyes, you get frostbite of the eyes, mouth, ears.”
The toxicity of carbon dioxide at high concentrations can also immediately damage the body, Campbell continued.
“And somehow you’re supposed to try to escape while your vision is going, your hearing is going.”
The frigid temperature of released high-pressure carbon dioxide also affects the steel pipelines, experts say, making them brittle and allowing a small rupture to quickly “unzip” into a major fissure.
At concentrations of 40,000 ppm, carbon dioxide is designated by the CDC as “immediately dangerous to life or health,” and lower concentrations are considered perilous for certain lengths of exposure, Campbell wrote in testimony before the commission. She cites academic studies predicting that dangerous levels could be reached within five minutes of a rupture.
“This pipeline does not provide any benefit to those whose lives are placed at risk along the pipeline,” Campbell’s testimony continued. “For them, the risk/benefit assessment is all risk and no benefit.”
Mark Maple, senior gas engineer for the Illinois Commerce Commission, emphasized safety risks in his testimony recommending the commission deny One Earth’s proposal.
“In my opinion the current safety regulations, as they pertain to carbon dioxide pipelines, are not sufficient to guarantee the public’s safety in all possible scenarios,” he testified. “Therefore, I cannot say with certainty that all citizens along the route will be safe if a rupture were to occur.”
While residents are concerned about the One Earth pipeline in its own right, they also fear its construction would mean more carbon dioxide pipeline proposals, to connect to One Earth’s pipeline and sequestration site.
One Earth’s original proposal called for a pipeline that could handle about 10 times the amount of carbon dioxide produced annually by the ethanol plant, and noted that the pipeline would serve third-party customers. In late March, the company revised its proposal to reduce the pipeline’s capacity, from a 16-inch to 12.75-inch diameter, though it said the pipeline still offers some capacity for additional users.
“Reducing the total potential capacity of the OES pipeline will reduce the volumes that could be released in the event of a pipeline leak or rupture and therefore the CO2 concentrations at various distances from the pipeline in the event of a break,” Mark Ditsworth, One Earth vice president of technology and special projects, said in testimony filed March 27.
REX American Resources, One Earth’s parent company, also owns ethanol plants in Iowa, Wisconsin, South Dakota and another town in Illinois. Residents worry that the company would seek to connect these plants to the sequestration site, to collect tax credits for carbon capture and sequestration.
The Navigator and Wolf pipelines were both proposed to connect multiple ethanol plants to sequestration sites in Illinois’ Mt. Simon sandstone geology. Both companies withdrew their proposals from commerce commission consideration last fall in the face of opposition from landowners. The commission invited Wolf to reapply if it addressed concerns and requests for more information.
Safety concerns are not the only area where critics say One Earth’s proposal is lacking. The company has not yet secured needed permits and approvals for the sequestration site it has proposed in neighboring McLean County. The Illinois Commerce Commission does not need to approve sequestration sites, but the county in December denied a necessary special use permit, and the company hasn’t obtained other state and federal permits.
The company has also not secured leases or easements from the approximately 20 landowners along the proposed pipeline route. Pipeline developers can invoke eminent domain to secure rights of way if the project is determined by the commission to be in the public interest.
In testimony, Maple said eminent domain is intended to make sure a minority of landowners can’t block a project that a majority supports. He testified that eminent domain might not be considered appropriate if the company has obtained few or no voluntary easements.
One Earth “has yet to acquire any of the necessary easements” for the pipeline, Maple’s testimony states. “This demonstrates that the Company has failed to show that it has negotiated, or even begun to negotiate, in good faith with landowners…The lack of progress with landowner negotiations at this stage of the proceeding is highly concerning.”
On March 27, the company filed testimony regarding a revised plan that shortened the planned route by a mile and reduced the number of injection wells planned at the sequestration site, from three to two. Ditsworth told the commission this was to address landowner “preferences.”
In testimony, Ditsworth said the company “has had significant success negotiating with landowners for necessary land rights” to build two injection wells for sequestration. He said the company had acquired the rights to almost all the pore space needed around one of the injection wells and almost half the pore space needed around another.
Lasser was glad to hear of the removal of one injection well and reduction in the size of the pipeline, but she is still deeply concerned about safety.
“I’m no longer sandwiched between two (injection) wells, but I’m still in too close a proximity, I would still be in great danger,” she said. “People need to realize how terribly unsafe it is. We need leaders that put people and their safety before private business.”
EMISSIONS: The U.S. Energy Department announces $6 billion for 33 industrial decarbonization projects, including electrification at Kraft Heinz facilities and a carbon capture and storage system at a cement plant. (Associated Press)
OVERSIGHT: Senators question President Biden’s three Federal Energy Regulatory Commission nominees about the body’s authority, their past stances on natural gas, and other issues in a confirmation hearing. (Utility Dive)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: Detroit automakers face a “very big balancing act” in the coming months and years as they attempt to match electric vehicle investments with anticipated consumer demand. (Bridge)
GRID:
OIL & GAS:
OFFSHORE WIND:
EFFICIENCY:
HYDROGEN: The U.S. Treasury Department today will hold the first public hearing on its proposed hydrogen tax credit. (E&E News, subscription)
COMMENTARY:
CARBON CAPTURE: A North Dakota electric cooperative is betting a $2 billion carbon capture project will allow a coal-fired power plant to comply with Minnesota’s law requiring carbon-free electricity by 2040, but critics say the plan is absurdly complicated and expensive compared to alternatives. (MPR News)
CLEAN ENERGY:
MATERIALS: The closure of three U.S. aluminum manufacturing plants, including one in Missouri, could threaten the transition to clean energy and electrification, experts say. (E&E News)
SOLAR: South Dakota’s largest solar project, a 128 MW installation near Rapid City, is scheduled to come online ahead of schedule. (South Dakota Searchlight)
CLIMATE: Nebraska’s 76-page climate action plan includes incentives for a host of energy efficiency, solar and regenerative agriculture projects. (Nebraska Examiner)
EMISSIONS: A new report calls on Chicago to set limits on emissions from certain commercial buildings that could grow stricter over time. (Chicago Tribune)
PIPELINES: Indigenous author and advocate Winona LaDuke says both North Dakota and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are to blame for the policing costs and handling of Dakota Access pipeline protests in late 2016. (North Dakota Monitor)
BIOENERGY: An Irish company plans to invest $400 million at a Wisconsin ethanol plant to include a new large plant-based renewable natural gas production facility. (Journal Sentinel)
NUCLEAR: South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem signs a bill into law that updates legal language and allows the state to potentially enter into agreements for nuclear power projects. (SDPB)
COAL:
UTILITIES: WEC Energy Group taps Indiana utility NIPSCO’s president and COO to lead We Energies and Wisconsin Public Service Corp. (Journal Sentinel)
CLIMATE: U.S. climate envoy John Kerry makes a final push for phasing out new gas infrastructure construction and cautions that capturing emissions won’t replace decarbonization as he departs the post this week. (Guardian)
ALSO: Advocates credit Kerry with devoting “tireless energy” to the climate cause, but say he could have pushed harder for international climate aid and frontline climate action. (Washington Post)
EMISSIONS:
COAL: Environmental groups release a policy platform to address nearly 1 million acres of idled, unreclaimed “zombie” coal mines across 12 states. (Daily Yonder)
ELECTRIFICATION:
OIL & GAS:
SOLAR: As solar installations lag in Massachusetts, advocates urge the state to re-examine its incentive program, which they say has not adapted to economic changes. (Energy News Network)
PIPELINES: Summit Carbon Solutions’ proposed multi-state carbon pipeline could qualify for up to $18 billion in federal tax credits over 12 years if the project is built and operates at full capacity. (Inside Climate News)
TRANSPORTATION: The Biden administration pours funding into a proposed high-speed passenger rail line linking Las Vegas and Los Angeles in hopes it will spark a national rail revolution. (Los Angeles Times)
OFFSHORE WIND: Scientists in Rhode Island work to debunk persistent social media misinformation that offshore wind construction is killing whales after a whale is stranded near South Kingstown. (Providence Journal)
CARBON CAPTURE: Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy proposes legislation that would allow the state to lease subsurface rights for storing carbon dioxide in an effort to maintain or increase fossil fuel production while reducing emissions. (Alaska Beacon)
OIL & GAS:
SOLAR:
WIND: A confederation of tribal nations accuses federal agencies of failing to engage with them before finalizing offshore wind energy plans along the Oregon coast. (KOIN)
UTILITIES:
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
CLIMATE: Washington state lawmakers propose spending carbon allowance auction revenues on electricity bill credits for low-income residents and to purchase hybrid-electric fire engines and charging infrastructure. (Washington State Standard)
DIVESTMENT: Oregon lawmakers advance a bill that would phase out the state public pension fund’s investments in the coal industry. (Portland Tribune)
CARBON CAPTURE: Montana advocates and residents push back against ExxonMobil’s proposed carbon sequestration project on 110,000 acres of federal land, citing potential impacts to wildlife, groundwater and livestock. (Independent Record)
ALSO: Wyoming lawmakers advance a bill amending a controversial law requiring utilities to study carbon capture for coal plants slated for retirement. (WyoFile)
OIL & GAS:
SOLAR:
POLITICS: Republican Utah lawmakers push a suite of bills that would make it more difficult for utilities to retire coal and natural gas power plants. (Utah News Dispatch)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES:
CLIMATE: California and several municipalities merge their lawsuits accusing oil companies of using disinformation campaigns to thwart efforts to reduce emissions. (DeSmog)
CLEAN ENERGY: California regulators approve a plan requiring the state to reduce electricity sector emissions by adding more than 56 GW of clean energy generation and storage to the grid. (Utility Dive)
UTILITIES:
MINING: The developer of a proposed lithium mine in Nevada struggles to work around environmental opposition and an endangered wildflower in its path. (Forbes)
GRID: Colorado lawmakers consider offering tax breaks to data centers, even though their outsized electricity demand could threaten state decarbonization efforts. (Big Pivots)
COMMENTARY: A California advocate urges state lawmakers to pass a bill that would establish carbon dioxide pipeline regulations. (LegalPlanet)
CARBON CAPTURE: Wyoming issues permits for three underground carbon dioxide sequestration wells in the southwestern part of the state as the state looks to establish itself as a leader in the industry. (Casper Star-Tribune)
UTILITIES:
OIL & GAS:
EFFICIENCY: A national laboratory in Colorado joins an effort to reduce data centers’ carbon footprints by powering and cooling them more efficiently. (news release)
SOLAR:
WIND: The federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management launches an environmental review of potential offshore wind power development along California’s central and north coasts. (North American Wind Power)
HYDROGEN:
CLIMATE: Montana advocates urge the state Supreme Court to reject the state’s request to pause a lower court’s order requiring agencies to consider climate change impacts in permitting decisions. (Daily Montanan)
COMMENTARY: A Utah researcher calls on states to ban political campaign contributions from utilities because they open a “back door of influence” over their regulatory environment. (Utility Dive)
The company seeking to build one of the nation’s largest carbon sequestration projects in Indiana was trying to avoid a “PR disaster” by locating in a rural farming area, a company executive said at a community meeting recently.
But that decision has not preempted controversy over both the project itself and the company’s larger strategy.
Local opposition is quickly snowballing in the small towns around Terre Haute as the EPA considers whether to approve injection well permits crucial for a federal loan guarantee.
Wabash Valley Resources says it wants to build a fertilizer plant that will bring jobs to rural Indiana. It aims to use petroleum coke or other feedstocks to create hydrogen and then anhydrous ammonia while sequestering carbon dioxide emissions 4,500 feet below ground in Vigo and Vermilion counties, about 12 miles from the plant.
Residents feel the company and the federal government are making them “guinea pigs,” as several said, in a project aimed at taking advantage of lucrative federal grants and tax incentives.
The company has been seeking to capture and sequester carbon since 2016, when it bought the former Duke Energy coal gasification plant that it plans to retrofit.
The EPA on July 7 issued a draft permit for the two Class VI carbon injection wells. Residents said they were given only days notice by mail about the lone EPA public meeting on the issue, which was held August 10.
Many local farmers had never heard about the concept, and were outraged that the company did little outreach and the government gave them little notice about their chance to weigh in. A 35-day public comment period on the draft permit — shorter than typical 60-day periods — was scheduled to close Aug. 11. The deadline was extended to Aug. 21 at advocates’ behest.
“We understand that once landowners learned it was going in their backyard, there was a short ramp to learn about carbon storage,” Wabash Valley spokesperson Greg Zoeller said. “Admittedly, we could have done better initial outreach to the landowners. We hoped the EPA information session would ease most of their concerns.”
Since that was clearly not the case, the company held its own meeting Aug. 16 in the small town of Universal, where residents pelted the officials with questions and accusations.
Wabash Valley Vice President of Operations Rory Chambers was asked why the carbon couldn’t be sequestered at the gasification plant site.
He responded that injecting carbon there — under a river and closer to Terre Haute — would be a “PR disaster.”
“Admittedly a little self-servedly I said, ‘Well if I put it in my plant site, this plume will clip the north side of Terre Haute and I end up with 3,000 angry people,” Chambers said.
By sequestering the carbon around Universal, “If there are a few mad people, here I can talk to individuals…and calm them down,” Chambers said. “My god, if there’s 3,000, I’ll never be able to convince them.”
As outrage erupted in the room, Chambers continued:
“It’s not because you’re rubes, I don’t think you’re rubes,” he said, adding that he himself does not have a college education.
Wabash Valley founder Nalin Gupta, meanwhile, explained to the crowd that he previously worked in finance in New York, on a team deploying over $85 billion in energy finance.
“If someone said, ‘Here, take two billion dollars and do something that would destroy people’s properties and water,’ would I do it?” Gupta asked the crowd in an ill-fated attempt to reassure them about the company’s motivations.
“Yes!” someone yelled out. “Nobody in this room wants it!”
Susan Strole-Kos told Chambers at the meeting that she has spent many hours looking at data and studies about carbon sequestration, and fears the underground carbon plume could harm the farm that’s been in her family for 200 years.
“I have been given the job to be the steward of my land, and you are trying to take that from me,” she said tearfully. “It may be legal because you have worked politicians, you have the law in your favor, but it is immoral, and I don’t know how you guys can live with that.”
Strole-Kos said her family was approached by the company last year and invited to what they described as a meeting of local farmers about a fertilizer plant.
She thought it could be a good idea. But when she arrived, she found no other residents, just Chambers and two other company representatives who pressured her to “sign a piece of paper” in exchange for a few hundred dollars, as she told Energy News Network.
“I said, ‘No we are not fools here,’ it did not end well,” she said. “Maybe they thought we were just simpletons out in this area.”
Hundreds of residents turned out for a second meeting with company officials on Aug. 22, at an elementary school near the injection well site. Strole-Kos’s daughter Whitney Boyce, a high school teacher, worries about danger to students.
“We have our natural disaster drills, tornado drills, earthquake drills, we recently added active shooter training; now how do we prepare for a carbon dioxide leak?” she said. “We have to notify students and parents when people come in to spray for bugs. So I find it mindboggling we don’t have to notify parents when something like this is coming in.”
The federal Inflation Reduction Act expanded the 45Q tax credit to $85 per ton of sequestered carbon dioxide. Provisions of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law could also aid Wabash Valley’s plans.
The U.S. Department of Energy meanwhile is funding the development of hydrogen as a clean fuel, and there are various tax credits available for hydrogen production that the company could potentially tap. Wabash Valley Resources currently has a $33 million federal grant for hydrogen technology demonstration.
During the Aug. 16 meeting, Gupta touted the federal government’s support.
“The Trump administration reached out to me and said restart this plant, we don’t want ammonia from Ukraine and China,” Gupta said. “$20 million was given to us in 2019 by the Trump administration, it was followed by [support from] the Biden administration.”
Zoeller told Energy News Network that “this is not a local project, this is really the first of what I see as a change away from smokestack industry.”
But as multiple carbon dioxide pipelines and sequestration sites have been proposed in the Midwest, residents have raised fears of safety, environmental and economic consequences should carbon escape, as it did in a 2020 disaster in Sartartia, Mississippi. In Illinois, for example, residents and local governments are stridently opposed to the company Navigator’s plans for a carbon dioxide pipeline and sequestration of emissions from ethanol plants.
Near Terre Haute, residents are especially concerned since the area is a seismically active zone, and there is an abandoned coal mine underground.
During the contentious Aug. 16 meeting, Gupta repeatedly noted that there are 145,000 active and defunct carbon injection sites nationwide — mostly in Texas and California. Such sites have long been used for enhanced oil recovery, where carbon is injected into the ground to force hard-to-extract oil out of diminishing reservoirs.
Though common, critics consider enhanced oil recovery to be under-regulated and under-studied, posing a potential risk to drinking water. And they fear large-scale, permanent sequestration of carbon dioxide raises different and little-understood issues.
Doug Martin is town board president of Universal and lives less than two miles from the proposed injection site. He says the company never reached out to the town nor the local fire department.
“How can you say you have an emergency plan when Universal has never been contacted?” said Martin, an author and former creative writing professor at Indiana State University.
“I don’t want to walk out and see people passed out in their yards with permanent brain damage. It’s right by our park too, where kids play. My guess is when they start shooting that much into the ground, it’s going to go under all the houses.”
Under state law, Wabash Valley does not need permission from landowners to sequester carbon below their land. A state law passed last year mandates that permission is needed from 70% of landowners, but that law specifically exempts the “pilot project” developed by Wabash Valley.
In April, the legislature passed a law setting the price the company will pay surface landowners if carbon migrates below their land. Indiana state legislators have sought to pass a law insulating Wabash Valley Resources from liability, unless landowners can prove actual harm from carbon dioxide migration.
Meanwhile a 2019 state law declared carbon sequestration in the public good and allowed the use of eminent domain for siting the pipeline from the plant. During the community meeting, Wabash Valley officials said they would use eminent domain as a last resort, if they cannot obtain permission from landowners on the pipeline route.
Wabash Valley has said the plant will open in 2026, but Kerwin Olson, the executive director of environmental group Citizens Action Coalition, predicted the process will take much longer, as the company still needs “a jigsaw puzzle” of various federal and state permits to construct the pipeline and open the plant.
He said that in the meantime, the public is bearing unfair financial risks, in the form of federal grants and subsidized loans, not to mention tax credits and potential damage down the road.
“To me what this is really all about at the moment is them getting their money, where the public is assuming all the risks on the financial side of things,” Olson said.
“It’s potentially a Solyndra 2.0,” he continued, referring to the solar company that failed after receiving high-profile federal subsidies under the Obama administration.
In comments filed with the EPA, the Citizens Action Coalition argued that producing and transporting the petcoke, coal, corn stover or biomass feedstock for Wabash Valley’s plant would create more carbon emissions than they plan to sequester.
The coalition proposed in its EPA comments that a fertilizer plant could more efficiently and cleanly operate using the electrolysis method powered by renewable energy, rather than “the Rube Goldberg-machine approach replete with multiple sources of various toxic air emissions, acid gas generation, slag, carbon emissions, and risks to private property and public health.”
Citizens Action Coalition organizer Bryce Gustafson said it appears the increasing number of concerned local residents are “in it for the long haul.”
“They haven’t lost hope,” he said. “A lot of people were under the impression EPA was going to rubber stamp this, but now they’re understanding there are ways they can keep the fight going. When people come together and stand up for their rights, for their communities, it makes me proud to be a Hoosier.”
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