The Illinois General Assembly passed a bill related to carbon capture, transport and sequestration (often just called CCS) this legislative session. The bill is a product of negotiations between the Illinois Clean Jobs Coalition (including Prairie Rivers Network), labor, industry giants like ADM and BP, and the governor’s office. It creates meaningful protections at every step in the CCS process – capture, transport in pipelines, and injection for sequestration underground.
Like many of the critical policies that Prairie Rivers Network and our partners have fought for in Springfield over the years, it is complicated (see bill summary). We did not get everything that we wanted, but neither did industry.
Lucrative federal incentives are drawing industry, most are for projects that extend the life of polluting fossil fuel and ethanol plants. In Illinois, there are currently proposals for 22 sequestration injection wells, and CO2 pipelines have been proposed in 23 counties. ADM has been injecting CO2 from its ethanol plant near Decatur for years, and is planning to expand. The protections created in the SAFE CCS Act are necessary safeguards to manage the onslaught.
We’ll explore the details more in a follow up post, but we want to address the Mahomet Aquifer up front. During negotiations, PRN, EJC, and our partners strongly advocated for an outright ban on drilling CO2 injection wells through the Mahomet aquifer. A leak of sequestered carbon could pollute drinking water aquifers, altering water chemistry and mobilizing contaminants, like arsenic, that would otherwise be dormant. Many Mahomet Aquifer area legislators sent a letter to the Governor’s office supporting the ban. The final bill, unfortunately, did not contain the ban.
Supporting the bill, even without a Mahomet drilling ban, is still better for the aquifer. Injection through and sequestration under the Mahomet is possible now, with or without the SAFE CCS protections in place. The bill creates critical safeguards, including:
- keeping long-term liability with the sequestering company, and not the state or taxpayers.
- requiring sequestering companies to provide financial assurances for remedial actions, emergency response plans, site closure, and more, as well as requiring insurance ($25 million coverage) for any bodily harm or property damage.
- a long-term trust fund, paid by fees on sequestration, for site cleanup if the operator disappears.
- requiring companies to replace drinking water if monitoring shows groundwater is contaminated by CO2, and medical monitoring in the event of a substantial leak.
We must protect the Mahomet Aquifer. We look forward to working with legislators, community members, and our partners like Eco-Justice Collaborative to develop other strategies to protect this vitally-important resource.
