CCS in Indiana: Background
Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) is exploding across Indiana and the Midwest under the guise of reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to mitigate climate change.
However, the reality is that CCS:
- is a false climate solution.
- is way too expensive.
- will actually increase emissions.
- will be an environmental and public health disaster.
CCS poses huge risks to our health, our environment, and our safety. It will further enrich the fossil fuel industry and Wall Street investors while diverting resources away from real, cost-effective solutions like energy efficiency and renewable energy.
Proposed CCS projects in Indiana:
At least 9 CCS projects are being developed in Indiana in these industries: hydrogen, steel, ethanol, ammonia, cement, diesel, and electricity. They are:
- Wabash Valley Resources in Vigo and Vermillion Counties
- BP Project Crossroads in Lake, White, Jasper, Newton, Pulaski, and Benton Counties
- Tenaska Hickory CCS Hub in Warren County
- Cardinal Ethanol and Vault 44.01 One Carbon Partnership in Randolph County
- Valero and Vault at the Vault-Linden Ethanol Plant in Montgomery County
- Heidelberg Materials in Lawrence County
- Duke Energy Indiana's Edwardsport IGCC coal gasification power plant in Knox County
- Cleveland-Cliffs in Lake and Porter Counties
- Iroquois Bio-Energy Company in Rensselaer County
- POET and Vault at Vault GSL - Aster in Madison County
- POET and Vault at Vault GSL – Beargrass in Wabash County
Scale of known carbon sequestration projects under consideration thus far:
- BP: 23 million tons per year
- Duke Energy Indiana: 3.6 million tons per year
- Cleveland-Cliffs: 2.8 million tons per year
- Heidelberg Materials: 2 million tons per year
- Wabash Valley Resources: 1.67 million tons per year
- One Carbon Partnership: 450,000 tons per year
A Class VI permit from the U.S. EPA is required to permanently sequester CO2 underground, which takes an approval period of about two years.
- Wabash Valley Resources has obtained a permit. (The U.S. EPA issued a Draft Class VI injection permit in 2023, and they issued the final permit in January 2024, although that permit is under appeal before the Environmental Appeals Board.)
- Two ethanol CCS projects (One Carbon Partnership and Valero and Vault-Linden) have submitted Class VI permit applications
- No other CCS projects in Indiana have submitted EPA Class VI permit applications as of December 22, 2023.
For BP, CCS is directly tied to their “Hydrogen Hub” plans, which are being highly subsidized by our federal tax dollars. BP is leading the MachH2 Hydrogen Hub at the Whiting Refinery. They are planning a massive CO2 pipeline network and storage wells across six Northwest Indiana counties (listed above), and potentially extending into Illinois and Michigan, to store the CO2 made in the process of making hydrogen. They could also transport and store CO2 from other heavy industries in Northwest Indiana, such as steel.
To understand the impact of the 45Q federal tax credit, consider BP’s planned CCS project in Northwest Indiana:
- 23 million tons per year CO2 sequestered
- 12 years of operation
- $85 per ton tax credit
- = $23.46 billion in federal government tax credits
Duke Energy and Heidelberg Materials have been awarded money from the U.S. DOE for Front-End Engineering Design (FEED) studies to evaluate the technical and economic feasibility of CCS at their facilities.
- Duke plans to evaluate the feasibility of capturing and storing CO2 from flue gases at the Edwardsport power plant in Knox County, Indiana.
- Heidelberg plans to evaluate the cost and performance of retrofitting a cement plant with carbon capture technology.
More than 25% of the nation’s primary steel is made in Northwest Indiana at three large integrated steel mills. Cleveland-Cliffs owns two of these facilities, and is the largest flat-rolled steel producer in North America.
- Indiana Harbor facility: located near the BP Whiting facility, which is part of the MachH2 Hydrogen Hub that BP is planning. Cleveland-Cliffs is currently building a hydrogen pipeline from their Blast Furnace No. 7 in the direction of the BP Whiting facility.
- Blast Furnace No. 7 is the largest in the Western Hemisphere.
- Presumably connecting to BP Whiting Refinery
- Major purchaser of hydrogen from the MachH2 Hydrogen Hub (uses CCS).
- Burns Harbor facility: Applied for U.S. DOE funding for a Front-End Engineering Design (FEED) Study for CCS.
The pursuit of CCS at these facilities is distracting Cleveland-Cliffs from making the investments they need to make to pursue steel manufacturing that would actually be sustainable. What that means is discussed in detail in the report that the ACEEE published on our behalf in August 2023: Sustainable Metals Manufacturing Opportunities in Indiana.
What is CCS?
CCS is carbon capture and sequestration, also sometimes referred to as carbon capture and storage. CO2 emissions are captured from industrial processes before they are released into the atmosphere. The carbon is then transported via pipeline to the injection well, where it will be injected into deep, underground geologic formations for "permanent" storage.
Industrial processes slated for CCS could include coal or gas power plants, steel mills, concrete plants, oil refineries, ethanol plants, and other fossil-fuel intensive heavy industries.
CCS includes three distinct stages:
- Capture - CO2 is removed from emissions either:
- Pre-combustion by converting the fuel to a gas mixture consisting of CO2 and hydrogen before it is burned.
- Post-combustion by separating the CO2 from the flue gas (the exhaust gas that is expelled from the smokestack) using a mixture of chemical solvents.
- Oxy-fuel combustion, which uses pure oxygen instead of air to combust fuel, resulting in a flue gas composed of CO2 and water vapor.
- Transport - Once CO2 is captured, it is compressed into a supercritical state (combining the properties of gasses and liquids), pressurized to approximately 2000 PSI, and transported by hazardous pipelines to the injection sites.
- Sequestration - The supercritical CO2 is injected into deep geologic formations, usually at least ¾ of a mile deep, to be "permanently" stored in areas where the geology is deemed "suitable," like depleted oil and gas reservoirs, coal beds, or deep saline aquifers.
Risks and Hazards of CCS
Each of the three stages of the CCS process create economic, environmental, and public health risks.
Capturing CO2 requires significant amounts of energy. This can drive up the cost of energy for everyone and increase CO2 and other toxic emissions. Capturing CO2 is also extremely expensive, often requiring putting the public on the hook with financial support from local, state, and federal tax dollars through tax abatements, tax credits, taxpayer funded grants, and loan guarantees.
Transporting supercritical CO2 from where it is captured to where it will be stored also creates risks for local communities. A CO2 pipeline rupture in Mississippi led to hundreds of people being evacuated and dozens sent to hospitals. First responders said that some of the victims exposed to CO2 looked like wandering zombies. Others were found unconscious.
The Pipeline Safety Trust has an excellent resource, Carbon Dioxide Pipelines: Dangerous and Under-Regulated, that discusses the Mississippi incident and all of the risks associated with CO2 pipelines.
Storing supercritical CO2 "indefinitely" poses numerous risks:
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Earthquakes
The area in Indiana where multiple industries are attempting to dump their CO2 waste sits in the Wabash Valley Seismic Zone. The U.S. Geological Survey, or USGS, is still attempting to determine whether carbon sequestration is safe, geologically speaking.
Their preliminary findings show that the conditions in Indiana are similar to those in Oklahoma that led to hundreds of earthquakes after tens of millions of gallons of toxic wastewater from fracking were dumped underground.
The strength of those earthquakes is expected to increase, as the underground dumping of fracking wastewater continues. Earthquakes have also occurred miles from the injection zones, indicating that the liquid toxic waste travels long distances underground.
Check out this 2019 article by Tyler Sebree of ABC 57 in South Bend: The chance of a major earthquake in or near Indiana may surprise you.
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Asphyxiation and Stalled Vehicles
CO2 is heavier than air. If released, it will pool in one area and displace oxygen, resulting in asphyxiation and/or death of animals and humans in the area.
Symptoms could also include:
- comas
- dizziness
- seizures
- arrhythmias
- elevated blood pressure
- brain and/or lung damage
Since vehicles require oxygen for combustion, this would also result in vehicles stalling, which would make it impossible to use vehicles to evacuate the area or to get to injured people.
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There are numerous abandoned mine shafts in the part of Indiana where multiple industries are attempting to dump their CO2 waste. These old mine shafts provide the CO2 easy access to the surface.
In 2009, the Indiana DNR and the U.S. Geological Survey released a report entitled “The Occurrence and Mitigation of Carbon Dioxide in Homes Built on Reclaimed Coal Mines.” Their findings indicate that CO2 is already entering the basements of new construction homes on mined lands in Indiana. CCS is likely to exacerbate that problem, which could have deadly consequences.
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The release of CO2 into underground water or other waterways would result in contamination of our drinking water and the leaching of other contaminants, such as lead and mercury. The release of CO2 could cause damage to aquifers and the acidification of water, as well as damage to soil and crops.
Campaign Tools
The Rush for Hydrogen and CCS in Indiana Check out our webinar discussion of the risks of hydrogen and carbon capture & storage (CCS), what's happening in Indiana, and what you can do to take action in your community! Risky Business: The Need for 3D Seismic Imaging at the Wabash Valley CCS Project Check out our webinar discussion in which 3D Seismic Solutions offers a critical analysis of the geological and seismic risks of the Wabash Valley Resources proposed CCS project. We are paying for CCS with our tax dollars! Companies are motivated to profit from carbon pollution because we're paying huges subsidies to them through our federal tax dollars. The robust interest in CCS has been motivated by the enormous federal CCS tax credit, called IRA Section 45Q. This tax credit was initially put in place as part of the Energy Improvement and Extension Act of 2008, under the watch of President Bush. Both the Trump and Biden administrations significantly expanded the use of the tax credit, first under the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018, then under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022. The Section 45Q tax credit now gives polluters $85 per ton of CO2 sequestered for up to 12 years. The IRA allows owners of these tax credits to get cash for them by direct pay for 5 years, or to sell them to third parties as “carbon credits” for all 12 years. For the Wabash Valley Resources proposed CCS project in West Terre Haute, the math adds up to $142 million per year and over $1.7 billion from taxpayers for the first 12 years of the project. EPA Class VI Permits In 2010, the EPA created Class VI permits for injection wells used to dump CO2 deep underground. Since that time, there have been only 6 Class VI permits issued by the EPA, with 4 of them being voided since those proposed CCS operations were cancelled prior to construction. Currently, only 1 Class VI permit is active in the United States. Proponents of CCS like to point to the fact that there have been 145,000 permits issued for either active or idled CO2 injection operations. However, those permits were Class II permits used in oil and gas operations for what is known as enhanced oil recovery. That CO2 was not injected for purposes of long-term or permanent storage, but rather to recover additional oil or gas from depleted or low-producing wells. CCS is something entirely different, which is why the EPA created a new permit. The fact is that we have virtually no experience injecting CO2 for purposes of "permanent" sequestration and therefore, every project at this point is an experiment which forces unwilling communities and property owners to be the guinea pigs and assume all the risks. Indiana Law Despite potentially significant environmental and public health threats posed by CO2 pipelines and sequestration, Indiana state government is promoting it anyway. Since 2011, the Indiana General Assembly has passed four major pieces of legislation enabling CCS. The first law was signed by Governor Mitch Daniels and the other three signed by current Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb. Among many other things, this legislation created a permitting process for CO2 pipelines and granted eminent domain to operators of CO2 pipelines. Developers of the failed Leucadia Indiana Gasification plant proposed for Rockport, Indiana pushed for SEA251. They intended to make substitute natural gas using Indiana coal, capture the CO2 emissions from the plant, and transport the CO2 waste to be used in oilfields in Louisiana and Texas. This bill is exclusive to the proposed Wabash Valley Resources (WVR) project in West Terre Haute. The bill established WVR as a “carbon sequestration pilot project.” It granted WVR eminent domain for the sequestration sites if they acquired 60% of the needed property by means other than condemnation. WVR didn’t get everything they wanted with this bill - see SEA451 (2023) below. SEA442 also included a request for a study committee on geologic CO2 sequestration. Unfortunately, the study committee never happened. In other words, the Indiana General Assembly never bothered to take the time to study geologic CO2 sequestration before passing legislation that enables it. This is shocking, considering that SEA442 declared “the underground storage of carbon dioxide to be a public use and service, in the public interest, and a benefit to the welfare and people of Indiana.” This bill was primarily pushed by BP to enable their scheme to store a fraction of the enormous amount of CO2 bellowing from their refinery in Whiting. HEA1209 created a statewide framework for the siting and permitting of CO2 injection wells. The legislation makes Indiana taxpayers liable, instead of BP or other corporations, for any problems that occur after the site is “closed” - in other words, forever. This legislation also authorizes the Department of Natural Resources to issue a permit approving an operator to inject CO2, but only if amongst other items, the operator “has obtained the consent of the owners of the pore space underlying at least seventy percent (70%) of the surface area above the proposed facility.” Wabash Valley Resources is exempt from this legislation, including the requirement that they obtain the consent of property owners. This was the second piece of special legislation passed exclusively for Wabash Valley Resources, and only impacts Vigo and Vermillion counties. After failing in 2020, 2021, and 2022, WVR finally got what they wanted with SEA451. This legislation effectively authorizes WVR - and only WVR - to inject CO2 in Vigo and Vermillion counties, without having to compensate, notify, or negotiate with property owners before injecting, but rather only “before the anticipated migration of carbon dioxide as predicted by testing and monitoring.” The legislation also shifts the burden of proving damage, harm, or injury resulting from the project onto the backs of the public, effectively immunizing investors from risk. What a deal for communities in Vigo and Vermillion Counties: all risk, no reward.