Illinois Carbon Capture Project Captures Almost No Carbon

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Last year, the Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory celebrated what it called “the largest demonstration of its kind in the United States” at an ethanol plant in Decatur, Illinois, where carbon dioxide is being captured and permanently stored deep underground. According to Oil & Gas Watch, the project is a partnership among ethanol producer Archer Daniels Midland, oilfield service company Schlumberger, the Illinois State Geological Survey, and Richland Community College. To date, it has received $281 million in taxpayer dollars via Department of Energy grants. According to the Department of Energy, it has stored more than 2.8 million metric tons of carbon dioxide since 2011. Records kept by the EPA put the figure at 3.94 million metric tons. In a January, 2023 article, Department of Energy officials said the project “marks a crucial step forward in efforts to decarbonize the U.S. economy and power sector by 2050.”

But wait. There’s a catch. Those same EPA records also show that over the last decade the project has only captured between 10 and 12% of its total emissions each year. The rest has been allowed to escape into the atmosphere, which Oil & Gas Watch says raises questions about whether industrial-scale carbon capture technology can be a meaningful solution to global warming. Whether carbon capture will work became an even more burning issue this week, when new EPA regulations for coal-powered thermal generating stations emphasized carbon capture as a potential way to keep coal plants operating longer. The US has suddenly found it needs many gigawatts more electricity to meet the needs of a growing number of data centers. That need is causing a lot of people to take a second look at coal and nuclear — two thermal generating technologies that were scheduled to be phased out until recently.

William Burns, a founder of the Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal at American University and a visiting professor at Northwestern University, noted that even the modest amount of CO2 stored at the ADM plant in Illinois was only achieved with the help of massive taxpayer subsidies. “We’ve been providing these subsidies for a long time — billions and billions of taxpayer dollars — and we still have very little to show for it,” he said.

Turning Corn Into Fuel

The ADM plant in Decatur, Illinois, turns corn into ethanol and was the first large scale industrial facility in the US to permanently store carbon dioxide underground, where it is injected into a sandstone formation saturated with saltwater hundreds of feet below ground. In most cases, the captured carbon dioxide is injecting underground to force more oil out of wells that are nearly depleted, a process known as “enhanced oil recovery.” In that case, the additional oil recovered will add more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere once it is burned. ADM officials and carbon sequestration advocates argue that permanent carbon storage projects are needed to bring greenhouse gas emissions down to net zero in order to effectively address the the worst effects of global overheating.

Companies are planning to deploy the same technology in use at ADM’s Decatur plant across the US. A report last week by the Congressional Research Service shows that there are 130 pending applications nationwide to drill carbon disposal wells for permanent geologic storage of carbon dioxide. Another 33 applications are under review in Louisiana, North Dakota, and Texas, where the EPA has given the states authority to issue permits.

That sounds quite dandy, but Oil & Gas Watch points out that precious few examples of large-scale industrial carbon dioxide storage projects currently exist. Of the 13 carbon capture projects that reported to EPA in 2022, seven used the captured gas for enhanced oil recovery. Four injected carbon into the ground with waste produced by gas processing plants as a waste disposal method. Only two plants (including the ADM plant) were not part of the oil and gas industry and injected carbon dioxide into the ground for permanent sequestration. The other is the Red Trail Energy biofuel plant in Stark, North Dakota.

Federal Dollars Prop Up Carbon Capture Projects

As the EPA and state regulators consider approving more of these projects, the federal government is pouring billions in grants and tax subsidies into carbon capture, including the $281 million in grants for the ADM project. That is in addition to whatever tax breaks the plant qualifies for. The small percentage of carbon captured by ADM undercuts the argument that industrial carbon capture can have a significant impact on global warming. Skeptics describe carbon capture as a false solution that will never be deployed on a big enough scale to meaningfully reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Al Gore called carbon capture technology a “fraud” during an April, 2024 speech to environmentalists.

Though some experts hope the carbon storage industry can succeed, others say the small percentage of emissions captured after more than a decade is raising questions about the effectiveness of the technology. Charles Harvey, an MIT professor who once worked for a carbon capture startup firm and became skeptical about the cost-effectiveness of the technology, questioned the benefit of sequestering carbon at an ethanol plant in the first place. Some studies have shown that ethanol blended with gasoline is worse for the climate than straight gasoline because of the vast amounts of land needed to grow corn to produce it, plus emissions from making it and burning it in vehicles. “If our interest is in using government resources to reduce CO2 emissions, that money would be much better spent not making ethanol,” Harvey said. “You’d really be better off just replacing those corn fields with solar panels. You’d get a lot more reduction, and you get cheaper electricity.”

There’s More To Ethanol Than Meets The Eye

In fact, we did a lengthy article about ethanol and its use as a motor fuel 2 years ago, and noted the science shows that making ethanol creates more carbon emissions than just burning gasoline. Although it does burn cleaner than gasoline, the emissions occur in the production process, not the combustion process. When Congress enacted the Renewable Fuel Standard, it made federal tax credits contingent on showing the process had total emissions 20% lower than gasoline. When that standard proved too difficult to achieve, the rules were changed to make sure ethanol qualified and industrial farming companies like ADM reaped the reward. That’s what Charles Harvey meant when he said we would be better off planting solar panels instead of corn. Don’t dare say that in farm country, though, where the tax dollars that flow from the RFS are a vital part of the local economy,.

The Archer Daniels Midland facility in Illinois has fared better than most other carbon capture projects around the world. Though the technology has been around since the 1970s, most projects have failed. According to one review in 2020, of the 149 projects intended for storing carbon dioxide by 2020, more than 100 have been terminated or placed on indefinite hold, largely due to financial problems. Anthony Kovscek, a professor of energy science and engineering at Stanford University, called the ADM project a “great test case.” One lesson scientists learned, he said, was how to inject CO2 underground without triggering earthquakes. “As far as I have seen, there have been very few operational issues of note and certainly no leakage of CO2 to the surface,” Kovscek said. Well, at least that is something, but whether is represents good value per federal dollar spent is a matter of some debate.

Sally Benson, an energy science engineering professor at Stanford University and former director of the Global Climate and Energy project, said the carbon capture industry is still in its “early days” (we’ve been doing this for 50 years, Sally) but called it “a very important technology. Every bit of CO2 we put up into the atmosphere leads to more warming, and we’re running out of time,” Benson said. “This is a technology at hand that gives us yet another tool, in addition to renewables and so forth, to begin to reduce our emissions.”

No doubt that is true, but the question is, how long should US taxpayers be asked to fund projects that at best are only 10 to 12% effective? That really is the heart of the matter and CleanTechnica readers are free to make up their own minds on that question based on the available evidence.