What’s going on with carbon capture in Illinois?

The Archer Daniels Midland Co. carbon injection site was cited by the EPA for violations of the Safe Drinking Water Act in September after fluid from the facility was found to have migrated to an unauthorized zone. Just two weeks later, ADM paused carbon injections after reporting another leak to the EPA.  

Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) is a relatively new process that involves pumping liquified carbon dioxide deep underground to be stored permanently. ADM was the first company in the United States to receive an EPA permit to build a carbon injection well, and the Decatur site hosts two of just four fully operational carbon sequestration wells in the country. Back-to-back leaks there raise questions not just about the safety of that particular facility, but also about whether carbon sequestration can be done safely at all.

Illinois is prime real estate for carbon sequestration wells. Illinoisans need to be protected from potential health and environmental consequences. 

Ensuring that carbon sequestration can be done in a safe way is particularly important in Illinois, which has an especially large number of proposed carbon sequestration wells due to the Mt. Simon sandstone formations in the state, which geologists assert is a good rock formation for holding sequestered carbon dioxide. 

A new law signed in July created safety guardrails for carbon capture projects in Illinois, including limits on air pollution from sequestration sites, complex modeling requirements for emergency response planning, and a pause on any new CO2 pipelines until the federal government has finalized its updated safety regulations.

But the new protections may not be enough to protect the state’s drinking water. Many of the proposed carbon capture projects in Illinois involve injecting carbon dioxide into or near the Mahomet aquifer, which provides drinking water to nearly one million people in central Illinois and is a sole-source aquifer, meaning any contamination could be devastating for those who rely on it. 

Wherever possible, it is better to eliminate carbon emissions than to pump CO2 underground.

According to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), carbon capture and storage and other carbon dioxide removal strategies like direct air capture (DAC)—a similar technology that pulls carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and stores it underground— will likely be necessary to fully decarbonize, particularly for some industrial sectors where carbon emissions are difficult to eliminate. 

But as large investments from the Inflation Reduction Act and new federal incentives drive a massive influx of proposed CCS and DAC projects, we should be careful not to invest too much into costly technologies with potentially dangerous outcomes. 

Carbon capture, DAC, and other strategies that involve long-term underground carbon storage are relatively new, and sites like ADM’s are experiments. Underground carbon sequestration should only be permitted if it is proven to be safe, energy- and cost-effective compared with other greenhouse gas reduction strategies, and if it has minimal impacts on the environment.

We should instead focus our resources on phasing out fossil fuels, which will not only deliver more emission reductions faster and cheaper, but also make technologies like CCS and DAC more efficient and effective in the long run by expanding the supply of clean energy that can be used to power them. By dramatically reducing emissions now, we can reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere that we will need to clean up later on.