LWV Dives Into Carbon Capture & Sequestration

In April, the League of Women Voters column reported on a meeting requesting rezoning of a few agricultural acres for industrial use. The local board meeting to rezone a portion of land from agricultural to industrial was rescheduled but not captured on the county’s YouTube page, where citizens can view meetings live or recorded.

The board approved the rezoning request, setting aside a small amount of acreage on Fugate Farms for carbon capture and sequestration as part of the Valero ethanol plant in Linden.

However, the matter wasn’t settled. On local social media forums, someone posted a public notice for a setback on the same project, asking, “Should we be opposing this?” The poster mentioned concerns like soil and groundwater contamination.

The post read like someone who was ready to take action but first had questions. Questions anyone might ask include: What is carbon capture and sequestration, often called CCS? What are its risks? Do these risks outweigh its benefits? Many people also want to know: Can we trust a national or multi-national corporation – Valero Energy, in this case – to have the best interests of locals in mind? How do we know our soil and water will not be compromised? What are the rights of landowners to use their land for new income streams? And what are the rights of farmers looking to avoid being bought out by corporate agriculture?

These questions colored the Copper Box Solar Project. Farmers, living one or two crop failures from losing their family land, hoped to let some of their land lie fallow for the duration of that lease. They were convinced by local and state regulations and evidence from solar projects elsewhere that their soil and water would not be compromised. Several experienced soil and water scientists attended the meeting and spoke in support of the project. Yet the board voted against it. This reflects the power of emotional reactions and deep distrust of outside corporations.

The questions surrounding the CCS project with Valero and Fugate Farms might have resulted in similar lobbying and concerns. But no one showed up to object, no organized effort to inform people who might not know how to read between the lines on the public notice.

The questions and answers that will best inform the community are best addressed before positions become entrenched.

The May meeting to approve setbacks and notes from the rezoning meeting in March indicates that Fugate Farms, a family owned corporation in Linden, is working with Valero, a multinational energy corporation producing ethanol in the county for over a decade. The current project allows the local ethanol plant to sequester some of the carbon it produces over a mile into the earth’s crust instead of letting it escape into the atmosphere.

What is Carbon Capture?

CCS has been used by the fossil fuel industry for decades. To extract remaining or deeply embedded oil, companies inject CO₂ (carbon dioxide) gases into wells and apply pressure to bring the oil to the surface.

What distinguishes CCS is that CO₂ is pushed a mile or so under the earth’s surface, using the earth’s crust as a lockbox. Buried, it doesn’t contribute to warming the air above, changing airflow and warming oceans, impacting rainfall and accelerating glacier and iceberg melting, which raises ocean levels.

The core problem is not the “carbon capture” part. As LWV Climate Committee lead John Smilie puts it, “The fundamental problem with ethanol CCS isn’t the CCS part so much as the ethanol part.”

For comparison, gasoline puts 98g/MJ of carbon back into our atmosphere. Ethanol is about Ethanol 53g/MJ, and wind / solar are about 11g/MJ. MJ stands for megajoule, one measurement of energy. You may know others as calories, watts, BTUs. If you want to nerd out, the EPA estimates that a gasoline-powered car, which uses some ethanol, emits about 4.29 metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually; an EV car emits about 1.13 metric tons. The production of ethanol releases about 45-50 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, according to estimates from the University of Illinois’ FARMDOC Daily. Some estimates say ethanol may be worse than gasoline. That’s where CCS comes in.

CSS moves the needle in the right direction, but even in industry estimates, the ethanol is still adding carbon to the atmosphere and thus intensifying extreme weather. It’s also adding local pollution when burned and tying up tens of millions of acres of farmland that could be used for food, fiber, or energy production from wind or solar, which are, without exaggeration, around 100 times as efficient per acre.

CCS attached to an ethanol plant does something quite different from CCS used to extract more oil or gas from aging fields. Ethanol CCS primarily aims to clean up a biofuel that still releases a lot of carbon. CCS helps ethanol qualify for new federal incentives, many tied to cleaner aviation fuel, given there is no clear plan to electrify air travel.

CCS and Ethanol

At the Linden Valero corn ethanol plant and others like it, the main CCS opportunity is capturing the nearly pure stream of carbon dioxide that comes off during fermentation, necessary for making gas. When yeast turns corn starch into ethanol, it produces CO₂ as a byproduct, which is currently vented to the atmosphere. Ethanol CCS systems integrate into this part of the process: they dry, compress, and cool that fermentation CO₂, then send it by pipeline to a deep underground formation for injection and storage in rock layers far below drinking water.

Since this fermentation CO₂ is already concentrated, it is one of the cheapest and most energy-efficient forms of carbon capture available today, requiring less additional energy than scrubbing CO₂ from a coal plant smokestack or the air. The injection wells used are “Class VI” wells under the EPA’s Underground Injection Control program, with specific requirements to ensure CO₂ stays confined, monitor pressure and movement underground, and protect groundwater. These wells are designed for long-term geologic storage, not for producing more oil or gas.

The CO₂ from fermentation would go into deep saline formations that contain brine, not oil-bearing layers, and the project’s economics hinge on federal tax credits for sequestering carbon underground, not on selling additional barrels of oil. While this does not make the technology risk-free, it means local residents should avoid conflating “CCS for more oil” with “CCS to reduce emissions from an existing biorefinery.”

Ethanol’s CO₂ Problem Isn’t Fixed

Corn for ethanol is a significant income source for farmers. However, it must be planted, fertilized, sprayed, harvested and hauled to the plant, all of which burn fuel and release nitrous oxide from fertilizer – a potent greenhouse gas. Land that could store CO₂ in prairie grass or forest trees or grow food crops is instead used for fuel.

Today, roughly 40 percent of U.S. corn production goes to ethanol; after accounting for co-products like distillers’ grains used in animal feed, that translates to about 17–25 percent of corn acres effectively devoted to fuel instead of food. The World Resources Institute and others have warned that using prime cropland for energy creates competition between fuel and food, constrains ecosystem restoration, and can lock in a high-emissions agricultural system. This is why Smilie emphasizes that “the primary issue is not CCS. That’s good. The issue is that ethanol is still releasing so much carbon that contributes to greater weather extremes.” I

n a year shaped by a larger El Niño, scientists expect those added greenhouse gases to result in more intense rainfall and flooding in some regions and deeper drought and fire risk in others.

Local farms like Fugate Farms are already surviving due to biofuels. Corn sold to Valero supports a regional economy that has facilitated equipment purchases, land rents and family livelihoods. We must set aside questions about outside corporations, which are too broad for this week’s column.

Our concern is whether we can understand the processes that produce energy without harming the well-being of our children and grandchildren. As engaged citizens, we should be able to ask hard questions of companies that want to bring diverse energy sources to our community and help us develop a resilient energy grid. We should know enough about the processes and technology that provide that energy to assess what conditions should be attached to our support. The ideal is to aim for more cyclical, value-added energy sources that don’t require additional maintenance.

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.