CO2 INJECTION WORK AT DECATUR NEARS HALFWAY POINT

Regional Partnership Program Approaching 500,000 Tonnes Stored

Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
5/3/13

CO2 injection work overseen by one of the Department of Energy’s Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnerships is nearing its halfway point in Illinois and is set to reach half a million tonnes stored by the end of the month, a project official said this week. The Illinois State Geological Survey’s Rob Finley is leading the injection project being run by the Department’s Midwest Geological Sequestration Consortium. In an interview with GHG Monitor, Finley said his team has to date injected approximately 470,000 tonnes of CO2 into the Illinois Basin’s Mount Simon sandstone formation from an injection site near Decatur, Ill. “It’s been going very well so far. The reservoir quality has been excellent, the CO2 has been very easily going into the reservoir and we’ve seen no indication of leakage,” Finley said. “Because the Mount Simon is 1,500 feet thick, the CO2 is staying in the bottom few hundred feet of the Mount Simon. It’s not even coming close to the overlying shale seal.”

Finley said that at the group’s current CO2 injection rate of 1,000 tonnes per day, the project is expected to hit its halfway point by the end of the month. In the meantime, Finley said the team—which includes Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) and Schlumberger Carbon Services—continues to take monthly samples of groundwater and soil gas and flux for environmental monitoring purposes.  “There are four groundwater wells that the regulators require us to look at and investigate, but we’ve got about a dozen others that we also do that are far afield and more widespread,” Finley said. The Decatur storage project has applied for one of the Environmental Protection Agency’s first Class VI Underground Injection Control (UIC) permits, but until that is approved, the venture is being regulated under a Class I non-hazardous waste UIC permit.

Sister ICCS Project Moving Forward

The regional partnership began CO2 injection work in November 2011 using captured CO2 from a nearby ethanol plant owned by ADM. Finley said he expects injection work to continue through late 2014, until the project meets its one million tonne sequestration limit. At that point, the partnership will continue post-cessation with three years of monitoring work, he added.

That work will eventually overlap with a larger-scale industrial carbon capture and storage demonstration project being funded with more than $140 million in stimulus dollars under DOE’s Industrial CCS Program. That project, which includes many of the same participating organizations, will be led by ADM and will also capture CO2 from the same ethanol production facility—but at a higher quantity. The project will pump the carbon into the same saline reservoir at an injection point about a mile away from the current regional partnership injection well, and is currently waiting for its Class VI UIC permit from EPA to begin drilling operations. In the meantime, project officials are completing construction of surface facilities for CO2 capture, compression and transmission over the next couple of months, said project director Scott McDonald of ADM. “We anticipate receiving the final [UIC] permit in August 2013, but that is only an estimate. If we have the permit then, we should be begin operation in the first quarter of 2014,” he added.

The large-scale CCS project is expected to capture roughly three times as much carbon as the regional partnership’s work—totaling one million tonnes of CO2 annually. “The second project takes advantage of the fact that we’ve got this source of 99.9 percent-pure CO2 from ADM and we would do things that would scale up from the regional partnership project to do something that much more resembles what a commercial well would look like,” Finley said.