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A row of executives from grain processing behemoth Archer Daniels Midland watched Verlyn Rosenberger, 88, take the podium at a Decatur City Council meeting last week. It was the first meeting since she and the rest of her central Illinois community learned of a second leak at ADM’s carbon dioxide sequestration well below Lake Decatur, their primary source of drinking water.
“Just because CO2 sequestration can be done, it doesn’t mean it has to be done,” the retired primary school teacher told the city council. “Pipes finally leak.”
ADM’s facility in central Illinois was the first permitted commercial carbon sequestration operation in the country, and is at the forefront of a booming, multibillion-dollar carbon capture and storageor CCS, industry that promises to permanently sequester planet-warming carbon dioxide deep underground.
The emerging technology has become a cornerstone of government strategies to reduce fossil fuel emissions and meet climate goals. Meanwhile, the Biden administration’s signature climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, increased industry subsidies and tax credits and sparked a CCS gold rush.
There are now only four carbon sequestration pits operating in the United States — two each in Illinois and Indiana — but many more are on the way. Three proposed pipelines and 22 wells are up for review by state and federal regulators in Illinois, where the geography makes the landscape particularly suitable for CCS. Nationwide, the US Environmental Protection Agency reviews 150 different applications.
But if CCS operations leak, they can pose significant risks to water resources. This is because pressurized CO2 stored underground can escape or drive brine trapped in the salt reservoirs typically used for permanent storage. The leaks can lead to heavy metal contamination and possibly lower pH levels, all of which can make drinking water undrinkable. That’s what bothers critics of carbon sequestrationwho worry that it solves one problem by creating another.
Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco / Grist
In September, the public learned of a leak at ADM’s Decatur site after it was reported by E&E News, which covers energy and environmental issues. Additional tests ordered by the EPA turned up a second leak later that month. The EPA has confirmed that these leaks pose no threat to water resources. Still, they raise concerns about whether more leaks are likely, whether the public has any right to know when leaks are occurring, and whether CCS technology is really a viable climate solution.
Officials with Chicago-based ADM spoke immediately after Rosenberger during the Decatur City Council meeting. They tried to allay her concerns. “We simply wouldn’t do it if we didn’t believe it was safe,” said Greg Webb, ADM’s vice president of state-government relations.
But ADM kept local and state officials in the dark about the first leak for months. They discovered it in March, five months after they discovered corrosion in the pipes in the sequestration pit. None of the leaks were made public, however, as the company petitioned the city of Decatur this spring for an easement to expand its operations. The company also remained tight-lipped about the leak as it took part in major negotiations between April and May over the state’s first CCS regulations, the SAFE CCS Act, according to several involved parties.
As a result, when Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker signed those CCS regulations at ADM’s Decatur facility in July, he was unaware of the leak occurring more than 5,000 feet below his seat, his office confirmed .
“I thought we were negotiating in good faith with ADM,” bill sponsor and state Sen. Laura Fine, a Democrat, said in a statement. “When negotiating complex legislation, we expect all parties to be friendly and transparent to ensure that we introduce effective legislation.”
It is unclear whether ADM was required by law to report the leaks earlier than it did. According to the company’s permits, it must only notify state and local officials if there are “major” or “serious” emergencies. The EPA declined to comment on whether ADM was required to disclose it, and neither the EPA nor ADM would confirm whether the two leaks in Decatur qualified as “minor” emergencies.
In a statement, an ADM spokesman said “the developments took place at a depth of approximately 5,000 feet. They posed no threat to surface or groundwater, nor to public health. It is for those reasons that additional notices have not been made.”
That’s little comfort to Jenny Cassel, a senior attorney at Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law firm.
“It’s a little scary,” Cassel said. “Because if in fact the operator made the wrong decision, and there is in fact a major problem, then not only will local officials not know about it, EPA is not going to know about it, which indeed appears to have happened here.”
The Illinois Clean Jobs Coalition, which applauded the signing of the regulatory bill earlier this summer, called ADM’s decision to keep the March 2024 leak from the public “unacceptable and dangerous.”
David Horn, a city councilman and professor of biology at Decatur’s Millikin University, said the city was blindsided. “This information was substantive, relevant information that could have affected the terms of the easement that was ultimately signed in May 2024,” he said, adding that the delay in disclosure calls into question the long-term safety of CCS and its capability. from the EPA to protect water from future CCS accidents.
ADM waited until July 31 to notify the EPA of the leak, more than three months after it was discovered. The EPA alerted a small number of local and state officials and ordered the company to conduct further testing. They also issued a notice for alleged violations, citing the movement of CO2 and other fluids outside “authorized zones” and the company’s failure to comply with its own monitoring, emergency response and recovery plans.
But the violations were not made public until September 13, when E&E News the leak first reported.
Two weeks later, ADM notified the EPA that it had discovered a second suspected leak. Only then did they temporarily suspend CO2 injections into the well.
Councilor Horn says it is not good enough.
“The ADM company was aware of the leak in March, and we weren’t aware of it until September,” Horn said. “So actually the city of Decatur, its residents, the decision makers have been on the back foot for months.”
Meanwhile, the city of Decatur has contracted with an environmental attorney. They have not yet taken any legal action.
Central Illinois is becoming a hotspot for the burgeoning CCS industry statewide because of the Mount Simon Sandstone, a deep saline formation of porous rock that is particularly well-suited for CO2 storage. It lies under the majority of Illinois and spills into parts of Indiana and Kentucky. It has an estimated storage capacity of up to 150 billion tons of CO2, making it the largest reservoir of its kind anywhere in the Midwest.
However, there are concerns that pumping CO2 into saline reservoirs near groundwater risks pushing CO2 and brine under pressure to those resources, posing additional pollution risks. “Brine is pretty nasty stuff,” said Dominic Diguilio, a retired geoscientist from the EPA’s Office of Research and Development. “It has a very high concentration of salts, heavy metals, sometimes volatile organic compounds and radionuclides such as radium.”
Horn says with so many more wells planned for Illinois, the Decatur leaks should be a wake-up call, not just for the city, but for the region. He is particularly concerned about any future wells near East Central Illinois’ primary drinking water source, the Mahomet Aquifer, which lies above the Mount Simon Sandstone Formation.
Nearly a million people rely on the Mahomet Aquifer for drinking water, according to the Prairie Research Institute. In 2015, the EPA designated the underground reservoir as a “sole source,” meaning there are no other viable drinking water alternatives if the groundwater becomes contaminated. When it comes to the Mahomet Aquifer, “there’s no room for error if there’s a mistake,” Horn said.
With the CCS boom looming, rural Illinois counties are bracing themselves for future carbon leakage, said Andrew Renh, the director of climate policy at Prairie Rivers Network, a Champaign-based environmental advocacy organization.
DeWitt County, a half-hour north of Decatur, passed a ban on carbon sequestration last year. West of Decatur, Sangamon County previously extended an existing moratorium on transporting or storing CO2 underground. And just last week, Champaign County, directly east of Decatur, advanced an ordinance to consider a 12-month moratorium on CCS.
Rehn said his organization would like to see all 14 counties that overlap the Mahomet Aquifer impose such bans.
In the meantime, her hope is that state lawmakers finish what the Illinois counties started. Two companion bills introduced earlier this year would fix the regulatory gaps left by the CCS bill that Pritzker signed this summer. The bills would immediately ban carbon sequestration in and around the Mahomet Aquifer.
“My community, as well as many surrounding areas, depend on the Mahomet Aquifer to provide clean drinking water, support our agriculture and sustain industrial operations,” bill sponsor and state Sen. Paul Faraci, a Democrat, said in a statement . “Protecting the health and livelihoods of our residents and industries that rely on the aquifer must remain our top priority.
As the Decatur City Council meeting adjourned last week, Rosenberger helped her husband Paul Rosenberger put on his coat. The row of ADM officials behind her walked by and then lingered in the council chamber. “I’m not afraid of them,” Rosenberger said as she drove her husband out.
“We haven’t changed anything yet,” Rosenberger said. “But I think maybe we can.”
