A proposal by a Gibson City ethanol producer would add three carbon capture wells in McLean County. Environmental advocates say that's too close to a fresh water source which replenishes the county's drinking water supply.
Three wells for carbon dioxide sequestration could store up to 90 million metric tons [MMT] of CO2 over a 20-year injection period deep underneath Central Illinois. Carbon capture, also referred to as sequestration, prevents the carbon from being released into the earth's atmosphere and avoid further consequences of climate change.
The wells, proposed by OneEarth Energy, are in the midst of a draft permit and public comment period which will be approved or rejected by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency [EPA].
According to OneEarth, though, the wells would never reach full capacity.
The EPA is recommending approval of the plan but is still taking public comment during the draft permit phase. The period is approaching its deadline of Sept. 23. The day before, Sept. 22, there will be a hearing at the Countryside Event Center in Gibson City for the public to ask questions of the EPA and give public comment.
At a capacity of 30 MMT each, the wells are slated to be located about 5 miles west of Gibson City and at the eastern edge of McLean County.
Lan Richart, co-director of the Eco-Justice Collaborative based in Champaign, said the wells are part of a growing hunger for sequestration wells across Illinois.
“Illinois has supposedly the perfect geology for sequestering large volumes of carbon dioxide, and so there is an overall national push to create carbon capture sequestration systems and move that carbon dioxide into locations where it can be stored theoretically in perpetuity,” he said.
Environmental advocates, including Richart, warn of the danger of allowing carbon sequestration wells so close to the Mahomet Aquifer, the sole source of drinking water for nearly 1 million people in Central Illinois.
If the draft permits are approved, McLean County government would then review applications for special use permits, according to county administrator Cassy Taylor.
"The application for permit will be submitted to our Building and Zoning Department. The application will then go before the Zoning Board, and if approved at that stage, it will then be brought before the County Board for approval," said Taylor. "The County Board may only consider the evidence and testimony presented at the Zoning Board. It cannot consider new evidence."
In that case, the county board is limited, according to board member Corey Beirne.
"It is important to understand that the county is the last in line of several state and federal agencies who approve facilities like this. Our scope is limited; we can only evaluate whether the company applying has followed our permitting processes, not on our own standards," he said on Facebook.
One concern is combustibility. Beirne said in case of an emergency, the Bloomington Fire Department would handle it at the site. He said they are an important opinion in the matter.
"One of the things we’ll be checking VERY closely is that the company’s plans are in strict compliance with the plans written by the people who’d have to walk into that hypothetical crisis," Beirne said. "Be assured, if the firefighters aren’t on board then we aren’t either."
Set in stone
The precise placement of the wells was purposeful, said Curt Blakley, vice president of CCS operations at OneEarth and geologist.
When looking for where wells could be placed, OneEarth looked at several factors, he said, including its depth.
“That Mahomet Aquifer, where it is present, it’s about 300 to 350 feet deep, and we’re injecting into a formation that’s well over 6,000 feet below the ground surface, so it’s keeping that vertical separation in mind when we’re looking at the well development,” he said.
Blakley said the construction of the wells also accounts for unconsolidated aquifers, irregular collections of water that could be used to fill the Mahomet Aquifer, to also protect them.
“When you drill a well to this depth, you typically have a surface casing that will — it’s an intact steel casing that will go down to the depth of bedrock surface, so it will completely isolate anything on the outside of that,” Blakley said.
Every project, he said, that needs sequestration needs a source of CO2, a well and a rock that will hold the CO2. For OneEarth, these wells will bring its CO2 from the ethanol fermentation at its Gibson City plant to the ground underneath Central Illinois.
In the project site, the combination of the Mount Simon Sandstone, thousands of feet of carbonates and Eau Claire, Maquoketa and New Albany shales act as a seal for the carbon, according to Blakley.
Not only that, but the capacity of the wells is at OneEarth’s discretion, and the company does not want to fill all three of its wells in that 20-year period. In fact, they would like to not even fill one.
“We’ve designed the new pipeline to be of capacity to support the amount of CO2 that’s generated strictly from the fermentation at the ethanol plant here, and we’re trying to have the least amount of CO2 product at any one time moving down that pipeline in the event that there’s any exposure, just to protect the public and make sure that this is one of the safest pipelines in the state of Illinois,” said Steven Kelly, president and CEO of OneEarth Sequestration and OneEarth Energy.
Kelly said OneEarth plans to capture about a million and a half metric tons of CO2 per year into one well, rather than try to fill the capacity of all three over the 20 years. Furthermore, 90 MMT is not within the possibility for the wells, according to Blakley, because that would exceed the amount of pressure they could respectively handle.
In the recharge zone
In 2025, after numerous battles in the state legislature, Illinois passed a law to ban carbon sequestration near the Mahomet Aqiufer.
What was notably not included in the law was banning the practice in the "recharge zones" of the aquifer, or other water sources which replenish its supply.
“The U.S. EPA defined the limits of the Mahomet Aquifer, and that’s under the basis of our boundary, essentially, but they also included two additional areas they called recharge zones,” said Richart, whose organization helped craft the bill. “The recharge zone is where the water enters the aquifer, percolates through various channels into the aquifer itself.”
In other words, the recharge zones can be used to help fill the depleted aquifer with its drinking water supply. Richart said the recharge zones were not included during the crafting of the bill over disagreement of whether or not it was an effective one for the aquifer.
“Our experts believe that it is, and the OneEarth experts argue that it’s not a primary recharge zone for the aquifer,” he said. “The Illinois Water Survey, who did a lot of the work, preliminary work on the OneEarth project, did not come forth and support that. The U.S. EPA also did not support that in the long term. They were somewhat silent, even though they had designated that as a recharge zone.”
The location of the wells is the primary concern for critics of them.
“There are a lot of opportunities for CO2 to potentially escape,” said Richart. “It’s buoyant, so it would move up through the ground if it escaped. Could take years to do so, but nevertheless.”
Peggy Kaylin of Illinois People’s Action said her group is organizing around the issue all over the state and is keeping an eye on the OneEarth wells. They gave concerns to the McLean County Board on the subject last year.
“Once your water is contaminated, you cannot take that back, and if you’re sitting there thinking everything’s great, the Mahomet Aquifer is safe, and then the next day here it is contaminated because, oh, the door was left open, and the water got in, that sort of thing,” she said.
Kaylin called into question the general practice of carbon sequestration and holds concern over the possibility of the wells leaking underground. In the project’s area of review, which established the recharge zone, she called the boundary arbitrary.
“That area is affected because we put that much pressure underground. It spreads out and affects a larger and larger area, not just where the wells are, but it spreads out,” she said. “The area of review for OneEarth is 198.8 square miles. That’s a pretty large space and it’s all in northeastern McLean County.”
The area of review stretches across a rural area of eastern McLean and western Ford counties and includes the communities of Anchor, Saybrook, Gibson City, Sibley and sits on the borders of Colfax and Arrowsmith.
Kaylin worries, just like Richart, the buoyancy of the CO2 would cause it to rise to the earth’s surface and contaminate drinking water.
“This is something that is not just here one day and gone the next,” she said. “These companies are going to be operating for [20] years, and the CO2 is going to be operating underneath for thousands of years before it becomes inert.”
Public comment period
The draft permit process under the guidelines of the EPA allows for a public comment period. It ends on Sept. 23, the day after an availability session and public hearing in Gibson City hosted by the EPA.
While there is no specific number of commenters to speak or actions to take, Richart said the public voicing their opinion is important for the EPA to hear in its decision-making process.
“If nothing else, they show the agencies people’s concerns and that the public wants to hold them accountable,” he said. “It legitimately should be, has the project been sufficiently thought through, planned, engineered? Will it have an impact on groundwater?”
Richart said the EPA will be looking at any issues around the project to be surrounding impacts on drinking water. Although the Eco-Justice Collaborative has held public information sessions of their own for the public, Richart said activating the public can prove challenging.
“In the abstract, people are not easily motivated to respond to these, so if you’re organizing folks or coming in to provide information support, it’s when people feel they are threatened, when they have an interest that is being affected, and that’s when people come forth,” said Richart.
Richart said he most often sees people speak on the issue when a pipeline would run through their property.
Both Richart and Kaylin criticized the public comment availability in the process.
The EPA has its event on Sept. 22 and OneEarth will hold its required public meetings the month after. OneEarth will two sessions on Oct. 15 at the McLean County Fairgrounds. One at 10:30 a.m. and the other at 5:30 p.m.
Richart said the public’s availability to comment before then is problematic and Kaylin said two sessions on the same day does not accommodate enough people.
To that point, Kelly said OneEarth is following recommended statutes from the EPA.
“They wanted one definitely after the working hours, so we’re complying with what the legislature had put in place,” he said.
Those meetings are a chance for OneEarth to present the project to the public. Kelly said he hopes to provide education and settle any concerns.
