ADM WRAPPING UP SURFACE CONSTRUCTION WORK AT DECATUR SITE

Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
5/31/13

Workers at Archer Daniels Midland Company’s large-scale industrial capture project in central Illinois are expected to wrap up construction of the project’s surface facilities in the coming weeks as officials wait for a key CO2 storage permit decision from the Environmental Protection Agency. Construction of the $208 million above-ground carbon capture addition to ADM’s existing ethanol production facility near Decatur, Ill., is expected to finish in June, project manager Scott McDonald of ADM told GHG Monitor this week. “We’re currently about 90 percent complete with the surface facilities, including the collection facility, the blower booster [to increase the pressure of the captured CO2], the main compression facility and all the interconnected piping,” McDonald said. The project, which was allocated $141 million in stimulus dollars from DOE’s Industrial CCS Program, will capture one million tons of CO2 annually from the ethanol facility for sequestration into Illinois’ Mount Simon sandstone formation.

The final above-ground work comes as the project’s partners—which include the Illinois Geological Survey and Schlumberger Carbon Services—wait for EPA’s Region Five office to issue the project the country’s first-ever Class VI Underground Injection Control permit for carbon sequestration. The EPA Region Five office has been reviewing the project’s permit application since mid-2011, according to EPA’s website. McDonald said the project team is hoping to receive a draft UIC permit in August and a final permit by the end of the year. A spokesman for EPA Region Five said the permit application is “still under review” and that there is no date yet for public notice. “We haven’t made any decisions,” the spokesman said.

ADM to date has drilled, cemented and cased two monitoring wells into the Mount Simon sandstone formation, but must wait to drill its injection well—and finish perforating its two monitoring wells—until after it receives the Class VI UIC permit. “Once the surface facilities are complete, then we still would need about two months to commission the unit, test the instrumentation and basically have the unit ready to go,” McDonald said. “Mechanically, we’ll be finished at the end of June, but then we still need to do the commissioning and we have about eight weeks in the schedule to do that. After issued the final permit, we would need about five months before we’re ready to inject.” He said the team should be ready for CO2 injection operations by the second quarter of next year.

Project has Faced Delays

Work has fallen behind from initial plans due mainly to delays in receiving the EPA Class VI UIC permit. ADM had initially hoped to begin injection operations this summer, becoming the Department of Energy’s second large-scale integrated CCS project to come online behind Air Products and Chemicals’ Port Arthur industrial capture project in Texas. “I would have liked to have received the permit earlier, obviously, but it has been out of our control,” McDonald said.

Injection work for the industrial capture project will eventually overlap with a sister injection project being managed by DOE’s Midwest Geological Sequestration Consortium. That work, which includes all of the same project partners, has been injecting CO2 captured from the same ethanol plant into a reservoir about a mile away in the Mt. Simon for 18 months, having stored about 500,000 tonnes of CO2 to date after reaching its halfway point this month. That injection work is expected to continue through the end of next year.