A Tale of Two Projects

Energy decisions shape national security, Americans’ pocketbooks, our land and our communities for decades. Gas is fluctuating around $4 a gallon, demand for electricity has been increasing and while energy sources are now more diverse, opposition to the diversification is rising in some pockets of the country. Furthermore, because of the war in Iran, nitrogen fertilizer is now harder and more expensive to source.

But energy decisions aren’t merely far-off national decisions. They’re being made right here in our county, and the contrast between the Copper Box solar debate and the quiet approval of the Valero–Linden / Fugate carbon sequestration rezoning shows why transparency and knowledge matter.

Copper Box’s solar proposal drew crowds, headlines, and a vigorous airing of concerns about land use, where the power would flow and the cost-benefit analysis. In contrast, the Fugate Stock Farms’ request to rezone 2.7 acres from agricultural to industrial for a carbon sequestration injection site slipped through with minimal public visibility. Furthermore, the sequestration request will benefit Valero, an international petroleum company that sources Hoosier corn to produce ethanol.

The Jan. 13 public hearing to rezone land for carbon sequestration appeared in public notice ads. It failed for lack of a quorum, then was rescheduled for Feb. 10 without appearing on the county website as a public hearing. The meetings were not recorded on the county’s YouTube channel, and the agenda and minutes were not posted to the transparency portal. The League of Women Voters asked Zoning Administrator Marc Bonwell and County Administrator Tom Klein to obtain basic records and to provide comments on the hearing. (Note: The League also asked the commissioners for comments on the hearing, but has not heard back from any of them yet.)

On paper, the petitioner is Fugate Stock Farms, but the beneficiary is Valero’s Linden ethanol plant. The plant’s website claims it has a capacity to produce 140,000 million gallons per year of ethanol. (This may be an error on the site, as the U.S. only produces 15 billion gallons of ethanol annually and 140,000 million gallons is 140 billion gallons. We reached out to Valero’s media relations and are waiting for clarification.) Valero-Linden’s site also says it can process 49 million bushels of corn per year. Two out of three bushels of corn in Indiana go to ethanol production.

If that’s the case, Valero-Linden could produce 392,000 to 465,000 tons of CO2 just from fermentation, based on industry figures. That doesn’t include what is used to farm, transport the corn and ethanol to sites and what it emits when it’s burned.

All those tons of carbon need to go somewhere. The University of Illinois notes that carbon sequestration is increasingly an attractive solution.  While there are a number of ways to sequester carbon – planting trees is one biological solution – some plants turn it into liquid and inject it into bedrock.

If residents are concerned about solar projects, they should also be concerned about ethanol, in part because of the emission problem, solving the CO2 creation requires industrial geological solutions.

To make matters more complicated, the world is facing a fertilizer shortage, and a little over 40 percent of Hoosier corn goes to producing ethanol. With the war with Iran tightening supplies of nitrogen fertilizer, which is heavily dependent on natural gas, Reuters reports that U.S. farmers plan to cut back on corn planting. While the U.S. produces more natural gas and ethanol, we still face price shocks when war impacts the world’s supply of petroleum-based fuel.

It’s why state and local governments have been diversifying energy sources in recent decades. The Indy Star reports that Indiana nearly doubled its solar capacity in 2025, adding roughly 3 gigawatts and reaching about 6.5 gigawatts total – enough to power around 770,000 homes. State energy officials explicitly frame this diversification as a way to lower electricity costs and strengthen energy independence.

Research on agriculture and solar shows that solar coexists well with farmland, bringing high yields in food and livestock farming. Elevated panels and strategic shading help maintain healthy yields and improve water-use efficiency. League of Women Voters Climate Committee Chair John Smilie notes “that the net energy from an acre of solar panels can power a vehicle for 300 times the miles than an acre of ethanol from corn. This would make a 1,800-acre solar farm equivalent to 540,000 acres of corn ethanol – far more than Montgomery County’s total area of 323,000 acres.”

None of this means carbon sequestration at Valero is automatically bad; reducing emissions from existing facilities is important. But when meetings are poorly noticed, unrecorded and absent from official portals, the community cannot weigh trade‑offs between supporting one ethanol plant, protecting farmers from volatile fuel and fertilizer prices and pursuing truly diversified, land‑efficient energy like agriculture plus solar.

In an era of wars that can shut down straits and spike input costs overnight, Montgomery County needs energy decisions debated in the open, with clear data on who gains, who bears the risk and what alternatives exist. The contrast between Copper Box and the Valero–Fugate rezoning is not just a tale of two projects; it is a warning that without real transparency, we may keep choosing the familiar over the future – and our farmers, ratepayers and most vulnerable neighbors will pay the price.

The League of Women Voters is a nonpartisan, multi-issue political organization which encourages informed and active participation in government. For information about the League, visit the website www.lwvmontcoin.org; or, visit the League of Women Voters of Montgomery County, Indiana Facebook page.