Fears of choking on an odorless, invisible gas begin to weigh heavy on Central Illinois residents as talks continue for two massive “Carbon-capture” pipelines.
Navigator CO2 Heartland Greenway is pushing for 1,000 miles of pipeline through five states, ending in central Illinois. That pipeline would transport highly pressurized liquid carbon dioxide.
“They are wanting to pump CO2 underground and store it at about 7,000 feet,” said Susan Adams, a landowner who lives in Atlana, Illinois and just a mile away from another potential CO2 pipeline that Wolf Carbon Solutions is trying to develop.
The Wolf Pipeline would be a 280-mile carbon dioxide pipeline beginning in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and ending in Decatur.
“The pipeline is to take CO2 that’s been captured from other locations [like ethanol plants] and send it through the pipelines and inject it into the ground for permanent storage. There will be injection wells and we already know where some of those will be and some of the drilling will go down into the aquifers we have, specifically…the Mahoment aquifer,” said Adams. “The Bloomington city council should be aware of this and local governments like McLean County and Normal.”
The City relies on Evergreen Lake and Lake Bloomington for their community drinking water supply.Unlike Bloomington, Normal draws its water from 15 wells attached to underground aquifers, including the huge Mahomet Aquifer. Aquifers are essentially deep subsurface rock formations that contain water.
Who wants this?
The Biden administration has increased up funding to build a carbon dioxide removal industry.
The federal Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 significantly increases the tax credits for these projects, going from $50 per metric ton for carbon dioxide storage to $85. So ethanol plants will see some major dollars from the CO2 pipelines in tax credits.
Tyler Young is 250 yards away from a Gibson City CO2 pipeline and is pro-pipeline because he said he believes this will save the Ethanol industry and it’s great for corn farmers because the ethanol plants are basically customers of corn farmers.
The Gibson city pipeline is much different than the Navigator and Wolf pipelines because it is much smaller and it isn’t bringing in ethanol carbon emissions from other states like Iowa.
“About three years ago a local ethanol plant came to us with the proposition of burying CO2 in the ground,” said Young. “It is a clean CO2, it doesn’t have to be scrubbed.”
An Illinois Commerce Commission (ICC) staff member’s criticized and recommended denial of Navigator CO2’s proposed carbon-dioxide pipeline, despite others of the ICC being for it.
Navigator’s request for ICC approval for the Navigator Heartland Greenway pipeline “is not a benefit to the citizens of Illinois nor in the public interest,” ICC case manager Mark Maple said in testimony filed June 15.
Landowners, especially in Sangamon County, are not signing easements. Navigator would have to use eminent domain, allowed if the company wins ICC approval, to involuntarily acquire land for an “overwhelming majority” of the project. Adams and Fosdick are raising awareness and urging farmers to not sign easements. According to Illinois Times, Navigator has said it wants to avoid eminent domain whenever possible and continues to work on securing voluntary easements.
The Sangamon County Board had a meeting that both Susan Adams and Julie Fosdick attended where hundreds showed up in disapproval. Adams and Fosdick said they believe at their next meeting the Sangamon County Board will take a position against the pipelines.
Bill Lee, director of Sangamon County’s Office of Emergency Management, testified before the Illinois Commerce Commission that the proposed Navigator CO2 pipeline would be too close to the populated areas of Sangamon County.
But it’s good for the environment?
Julie Fosdick said these CO2 pipelines are actually carbon-negative not net-zero because eventually the carbon removal industry will attempt to get carbon emission from other places that they will first have to clean in order to pump it into the earth. That cleaning process release more carbon into the air hence defeating the purpose of net-zero carbon emissions.
President Joe Biden has said his goal is to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, according to analysts you’d need about 65,000 miles of carbon pipelines.
These two pipelines are basically going to be the first one’s of this federal initiative. Now, there is currently an ADM pipeline in Decatur and it’s been there since 2011, but again this one is different because they are not crossing state lines.
So how much time until the ICC grants these pipelines permission to invoke eminent domain? About 10 months, according to Adams and Fosdick (who are opposed to the pipelines).
Many landowners who would live near the carbon pipeline are worried about a repeat of the burst in Satartia, Mississippi, which left dozens of residents hospitalized. This pipeline was a bit different. It squeezed carbon that naturally was in the earth and used it to push out natural gas from a natural gas pipeline. Fosdick said that the Wolf and Navigator pipelines bursting would be worse because it’d be be more potent.