US carbon sequestration boom sparks backlash in small towns

Indiana town residents warn of pollution risks from carbon injection

In Clymers, Indiana, a small farming community among cornfields and industrial facilities, the proposal by Andersons Renewables to inject carbon dioxide more than 3,000 feet underground has become a flashpoint in a national debate over carbon sequestration. The project is one of dozens expected to receive approval from the Environmental Protection Agency and state regulators in the next year, according to the Guardian. The company, which was partly owned by a subsidiary of Marathon Oil at the time it proposed the project, said in a statement that carbon capture “is a safe, established technology, with a rigorous permitting, engineering, and monitoring process to protect groundwater, public health, and the surrounding environment.”

Resident Melissa Harrison, who is raising five grandchildren in a white-clapboard home, said the town is already burdened by a fertilizer supplier, a hazardous waste recycling company, and the giant ethanol plant that is proposing the carbon project. She said the community faces contaminated well water, a lack of sewage facilities, and high poverty rates. “If they make Clymers bad enough that no one wants to live here, they can take over the whole town, real cheap,” she told the Guardian. Most of her family members are buried in the local cemetery.

The generous subsidies stem from the 45Q tax credit, authorized under the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, which the Trump administration continued despite canceling funding for other climate projects. Brad Johnston, an analyst with the energy research firm Enverus, told the Guardian that the tax credits set off what some call “a carbon-capture gold rush.” Since even the smallest projects expect to store hundreds of thousands of tons of carbon annually, the credits could be hugely profitable. Kerwin Olson, executive director of the Indiana group Citizens Action Coalition, said a small project sequestering 200,000 metric tons per year can earn $17 million annually. “You can do the math,” he said. “That is a lot of cash – an enormous amount of cash. You’re talking billions of dollars.”

The company said it understands residents’ concerns and plans to work transparently with the community. It determined the site’s suitability through seismic analysis and a test well. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said carbon capture storage is one mitigation option that could help keep global heating in check, assuming it supports deep fossil fuel cuts, but has warned it should not be over-relied on.

Charles Harvey, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT, helped start one of the world’s first companies devoted to sequestering carbon in the early 2000s, but has since become a staunch opponent of the strategy. “It’s just the stupidest way to reduce emissions,” he said, adding that oil companies are lobbying hard for the projects and that money would be better spent on renewable energy. He acknowledged guilt akin to what J. Robert Oppenheimer felt over inventing the atomic bomb.

Environmental experts say the risks of carbon storage include earthquakes, water table contamination, and potentially deadly carbon leaks. In 2024, the nation’s first commercial carbon capture project, under a lake that provides drinking water for large parts of central Illinois, developed two leaks, prompting a state ban on new CCS projects under one of the state’s biggest aquifers. In 2020, a carbon dioxide pipeline ruptured in rural Mississippi, creating a mass poisoning that hospitalized 45 people and forced 200 to evacuate. “It looked like you were going through the zombie apocalypse,” Jack Willingham, emergency director for the affected county, told NPR.

Dennis Crume, a farmer who grows soybeans and corn on plots skirting Clymers, said he refused the $150 per acre offer to accept the project. “I said that’s bullcrap. I’m worried about my well,” he said. But Indiana state law effectively strips individual landowners of the right to reject these proposals, experts said. Crume said he worries about the pollution cropping up around him and is trying “to look out for our grandkids.”

Johnston of Enverus said that after the Illinois leaks, companies were being extra careful to engineer their projects to avoid further problems, and that any additional setback from a leak or well failure would be “pretty detrimental to the CCS industry.” The Guardian reported that the Andersons ethanol plant’s proposed project is one of many being pushed by oil industry companies across the country, with both Democratic and Republican administrations supporting the approach.