Proposed Bill Would Stop Eminent Domain for Carbon Dioxide Pipelines in Illinois

by Ilana Newman and Julia Tilton (The Daily Yonder) Following success halting multiple carbon dioxide pipeline projects, a local coalition in central Illinois wants to stop the use of eminent domain for these potentially dangerous pipelines.

Before the project was stopped, the Heartland Greenway pipeline was intended to transport CO2 from ethanol plants across five states for sequestration in central Illinois. There are 114 ethanol plants in those five states – South Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota, Iowa, and Illinois – according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Now, the Illinois legislature is considering a bill that would ban companies from using eminent domain to seize land for CO2 pipelines. The bill was brought to the state legislature by Hess, Sangamon County resident Kathleen Campbell, and other members of the Coalition to Stop CO2 Pipelines, the group that formed in 2022 to fight Navigator and other CO2 pipelines in Illinois.

What is Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS)?

A form of carbon removal, Class VI wells are used to store carbon deep under the earth for long periods of time as a way to mitigate CO2, a planet-warming gas, from entering the atmosphere. Central Illinois is home to the Mt. Simon Sandstone formation, a geological feature that’s particularly attractive for the technology, said Anna Littlefield, the manager of the Low Carbon Technologies Program at the Payne Institute at Colorado School of Mines. Developers working on CCS projects look for porous sandstone or limestone with impermeable caprock on top, she said. Central Illinois is a textbook example of this geology.

There have been tax credits in place since 2008 to incentivize industrial CO2 emitters to capture and store carbon dioxide.

Ethanol is particularly cost efficient, she (Susan Hovorka, a research scientist at the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas) said, which means ethanol plants can “make a mint out of it.” But higher carbon industries like steel and cement plants need higher tax incentives than what currently exist to make the cost of carbon capture worthwhile.

But some CCS opponents, including the Coalition to Stop CO2 Pipelines, worry that there isn’t enough oversight for the 45Q tax credits. “You can make a lot of money doing [CCS] thanks to our tax credits,” said Pam Richart, one of the coalition’s organizers. “The worst part about those tax credits is that there’s really very little accountability. The transparency is not there.”

When exercising the right of eminent domain, an entity can purchase private land, without the permission of the landowner, for the public good.

In Illinois, the Midwest’s many miles of cornfields produce large amounts of corn ethanol, making the region a destination for carbon capture and sequestration.. Ethanol is one of the easiest industries to de-carbonize, Hovorka said, because the emissions from ethanol production contain only CO2 and water. That means storing the carbon only involves dehydrating the emissions before transporting or sequestering them underground. If there aren’t sequestration opportunities on site, for either geologic or economic reasons, then a pipeline needs to be built to transport the CO2 from the capture site to the storage location.

“One reason Illinois is a hot spot [for CCS] is because of the proximity to all the ethanol plants,” Littlefield said.

Some states have additional regulations around eminent domain. After opposition to the Heartland Greenway pipeline in Iowa, the state passed a bill in January banning the use of eminent domain for CO2 pipelines.

When released from a pipeline at a high concentration, CO2 looks and acts like dry ice – a cloud of fog that stays close to the ground. But Hovorka said that it’s not very fast and it’s easy to move away from. The risk comes for those in low lying areas who are unaware of the incoming cloud: a sleeping person or animal unaware of the danger could asphyxiate on the CO2, Hovorka said.

“This is not a completely unknown substance,” Hovorka said. “Our bodies are completely comfortable with CO2,” she added, noting that humans have been using CO2 industrially for decades in the oil and gas industry. The danger, she said, comes from the concentration of CO2 in the air.

When asked about the safety risks of CO2 pipelines, Hovorka echoed a Pipeline and Hazardous Safety Administration (PHMSA) report about the Satartia incident. The issue in Satartia was tied to the area’s geography – the pipeline ran down a steep embankment and was affected by a landslide, according to the report. “They screwed up the engineering. They should have dug it in deeper,” Hovorka said.

Educating communities about how to respond to CO2 emergencies is something that Littlefield is passionate about. She wants to make sure that carbon infrastructure development doesn’t come at the cost of the people. “Communities have a lot of power here,” she said, “There’s always a risk when it’s a man-made industrial operation, but these companies are really trying to mitigate those risks as much as possible.”

(Republican state senator Steve) McClure said there’s a chance that the bill will be rolled into an omnibus package before the state legislative session ends on May 31, 2026. If that doesn’t happen, McClure said, the bill could get taken up again in the fall.

The bill is a bipartisan effort with 22 cosponsors and endorsements from across industries. “We’ve got the Sierra Club, Illinois Environmental Council, Farm Bureau, and the Soybean [Association]. How many bills do you know that have that combination?” Campbell said. READ MORE