Iowa environmentalists say the plan to build three pipelines to move liquified carbon dioxide — collected from the smokestacks of ethanol refineries — to North Dakota and Illinois, where the carbon would be pumped underground, will simply prop up the fossil fuel industry and shower their agribusiness investors with tax credits, as Nancy Averett explains in FERN’s latest story.
Pipeline opponents also worry that the companies developing them will inject the gas, in liquid form, into nearly depleted oil wells to coax out the last drops of oil. The process is known as enhanced oil recovery, or EOR. Oil and gas companies have been doing this for decades, and, opponents say, it would offset any climate benefits of capturing the carbon dioxide in the first place.
But John Thompson, technology and markets director of the nonprofit Clean Air Task Force, which promotes CCS as a way to neutralize the greenhouse impacts of fossil-fuel power plants, doesn’t see EOR happening. The pipeline companies, he says, have applied to the Environmental Protection Agency for Class VI saline injection well permits, which allow only for sequestration, not for EOR. Moreover, the pipelines, as currently designed, go nowhere near the type of wells that could use EOR. Says Daniel Sanchez, director of the Carbon Removal Laboratory, at the University of California, Berkeley, “There are no markets and no places where I see enhanced oil recovery really booming in the Midwest.”