Iowa Company Plans to Capture Midwest Ethanol Plants' Carbon Dioxide, Store It Underground

by Katie Piekes (National Public Radio/Harvest Public Media) A new business in Iowa wants to capture and store carbon dioxide emissions from ethanol plants. It would pave the way for biorefineries in Iowa, Minnesota, and the Dakotas to deliver carbon-neutral fuel to the market.

Summit Carbon Solutions, a business platform formed by Alden-based Summit Agricultural Group, will need to get state and federal permits for an underground pipeline. The pipeline would pump liquefied carbon dioxide (CO2) from 18 biorefineries into central North Dakota and store it in porous canyons at least a mile underground.

The company plans to install equipment at the ethanol plants that will take CO2 off fermentation that would typically be emitted into the air and liquefy the gas. Each ethanol plant will have a small 6-inch pipeline to carry the CO2 to the main pipeline that will pump it to North Dakota.

Fermentation, the process of converting sugar into ethanol, generates a lot of carbon dioxide, which is a major greenhouse gas that traps heat and accelerates rises in global temperature. Geoff Cooper, the president of the Renewable Fuels Association, said capturing and sequestering that CO2 could be a “game changer” for the ethanol industry.

“And frankly, puts ethanol from corn, ethanol from these facilities on an even keel with the best electric vehicles that are out there in terms of their carbon footprint,” Cooper said.

Summit Carbon Solutions expects the pipeline project to be up and running in 2024. READ MORE

Excerpt from Grist: Carbon capture and storage, or CCS, is often criticized for being too expensive to be worthwhile, but the process looks fairly different depending on where the carbon is being captured. Fossil fuel–fired power plants emit a hodgepodge of gases, making it difficult and energy-intensive to build a capture system that can separate out the CO2. But at a biorefinery where corn or another form of biomass is fermented into ethanol, the process emits a pure stream of CO2, with just a little water vapor mixed in.

“There’s no energy required for capture” at biorefineries, said Daniel Sanchez, an engineer and energy systems analyst at the University of California, Berkeley, explaining that only a small amount was needed to compress and dehydrate the gas. That’s “the reason why this works so well, why it’s cheap, and why everyone wants to do it,” he said.

Still, very few do. Two biofuel plants in Kansas capture their CO2 and sell it to oil companies that pipe it out to aging oil fields and pump it underground to coax up additional oil — a process known as “enhanced oil recovery.” Only one biorefinery buries its CO2 underground solely for the sake of taking it out of the atmosphere, and the project was enabled by substantial financial support from the Department of Energy. That plant, located in Decatur, Illinois, and owned by Archer Daniels Midland, has the capacity to capture 1 million tons of CO2 per year and bury it nearby. (As of 2019 the project was only capturing and storing about half that amount, which the company said was due to reduced ethanol production.)

Though it isn’t hard to capture at a biorefinery, until recently, captured CO2 had little worth. But now the economic landscape is changing. Summit’s project was made possible by a confluence of factors. First, in 2018, Congress increased the value of the 45Q tax credit, which will eventually pay up to $50 for every ton of carbon a facility captures and stores underground, and also made it easier to use. The final rules for the enhanced credit were released in January.

A second development came in 2019 when California’s Air Resources Board adopted a new carbon capture and storage protocol for its low-carbon fuel standard. That means ethanol facilities that use CCS to lower the carbon intensity of their fuel can generate tradable credits when they sell it in California. Producers of dirtier fuels that don’t meet California’s standards have to buy those credits to comply. Recently, the credits have been selling for around $200 per ton of carbon. Summit told Grist it will earn revenue through the 45Q tax credit in addition to sharing the value of the California fuel standard credits with its partner biorefineries. The company also expects similar low-carbon fuel markets to develop in other parts of North America and around the world, potentially creating more demand for Summit’s partner refineries.

The third factor is that North Dakota is one of two states that the Environmental Protection Agency recently granted authority over regulating Class VI Underground Injection wells — the category of wells developed specifically for geologic sequestration of CO2 — making the permitting process much easier for companies that want to inject carbon underground. Unlike Iowa, Minnesota, or South Dakota, most of North Dakota sits atop the right geological conditions for CO2 storage, called deep saline formations.

Jeremy Martin, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said that even as the world moves quickly to switch to electric vehicles, a full phase-out of gas-powered cars is going to take decades. It will take even longer to find zero-emissions solutions for airplanes and cargo ships, which are expected to increasingly adopt lower-carbon fuels made from biomass or hydrogen, in the meantime. “We’re going to continue to use quite a bit of ethanol for quite a few years to come,” he said. “We need to both do what we can to decarbonize all the fuels we’re using and we need to move to the cleanest fuels that we can at the same time.”

In a report released last year that looked at how the U.S. could achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, Princeton researchers found that success depends on a new national network of CO2 pipelines — potentially 70,000 miles worth. They found that even if the U.S. electrifies vehicles and buildings, and replaces almost all fossil fuel electricity with renewables, we’ll likely need to capture CO2 from cement production (which can’t yet be electrified), from gas-fired power plants (if any remain), from biofuels and hydrogen production, and maybe even from machines that can suck carbon directly out of the air — and transport it to a place where it can be used or sequestered underground. READ MORE