Friday, January 4, 2008 12:22 AM CST
Sequestration project in works at ADM; effort is similar to that planned for FutureGen
By CHRIS LUSVARDI, Staff Writer
clusvardi@herald-review.com
DECATUR — A project to test carbon dioxide storage capacity deep below Archer Daniels Midland Co.’s campus is scheduled to begin this spring.
The company will announce today a partnership with the Midwest Geological Sequestration Consortium, which is led by the Champaign-based Illinois State Geological Survey, to work on the $84.3-million project.
It will be one of seven projects the U.S. Department of Energy is funding to demonstrate carbon dioxide, or CO2, storage capacity in underground formations throughout the country. Researchers are looking for uses of carbon dioxide other than emitting it into the atmosphere.
“The whole idea is to understand what is going on in any given area to figure out whether this technique can be safe and effective,” said Robert Finley, director of the Illinois State Geological Survey. “Ultimately this is a technique that we are looking at very carefully to understand what the volume of the CO2 is that might actually be placed in the subsurface.”
The consortium will receive $66.7 million to test a part of the Mount Simon Sandstone, a saline-water-bearing rock formation that has increased in notoriety recently because the FutureGen plant in Mattoon also will test it. The formation runs below most of Illinois, Kentucky and Indiana and part of Ohio.
Beginning in late April, workers will drill more than 6,500 feet below the surface to the rock layer where the carbon dioxide will be stored. The drilling is expected to take about two months to complete, Finley said.
The energy department has awarded $4.2 million in funding for the drilling, Finley said. Another $5.24 million to cover the first year of the project is expected to be awarded within weeks, he said.
The project will inject 1,000 tons per day of carbon dioxide from ADM’s ethanol plant into the ground, Finley said. The layer where it will be injected is about 1,000 feet thick in the Decatur area, Finley said.
Injecting is scheduled to start in October 2009 and be completed in 2012. For two years after that, officials will monitor, take samples and make sure nothing is leaking from the formation.
It’s possible for the well to be used again if the site proves satisfactory, Finley said. About 1 million tons of carbon dioxide will be injected over the course of the experiment, he said.
A second and possibly third well will be drilled to help monitor the environmental effects of the carbon dioxide injections, Finley said.
The biggest environmental threat would take place if the carbon dioxide were to escape into the ground water, Finley said. Several layers above the injection layer are believed to be enough protection to stop that from happening, he said.
“We want to ensure we’re monitoring all of the deep subsurface layers long before anything can get up in the shallow subsurface where it can potentially cause any problems,” he said.
The land for the project is a now-empty field on the northwest side of ADM’s campus between its facilities and Richland Community College, said Dean Frommelt, environmental division manager for ADM’s corn processing, BioProducts and food additives.
Finley said that using an ethanol processor is mostly a matter of convenience, but the critical issue is how to use carbon dioxide from fossil fuels and specifically from coal.
Because this project will start more than three years before the FutureGen plant is expected to be completed, Finley hopes FutureGen can benefit from it. FutureGen will use a coal gasification process to generate electricity and to inject carbon dioxide into the ground.
“Some of the experience we gain in the test of the Mount Simon here will be very helpful in terms of the activity that will take place at FutureGen,” Finley said. “If FutureGen is successful, and if this experiment is successful and if we prove this can be done safely and effectively, I think what this opens up is the use of Illinois coal. It really is a whole new day for the use of coal.”
In part because the seals on lower parts of the formation have not been broken, Central Illinois is seen as a potentially good place for similar projects, helping economic development in the region. This part of Illinois also is favorable to the projects because no major earthquake fault lines run through it, whereas places farther south have more fault lines, Finley said.
However, Scott Frailey, an engineer with the Illinois State Geological Survey, cautioned too many projects would have a negative effect.
“There is a limit to how many wells you can have in an area before you would get in a capacity where they’d start interfering with each other and you could no longer have a high rate at each well that you keep adding,” Frailey said. “Eventually each individual well would keep adding less and less injection.”
Finley said the project at ADM will be one of the first of its in kind on a global level, helping to draw interest to the area.
“It’s certainly an opportunity because this whole global climate change is so timely,” he said. “This is going to be a world-class experiment just like FutureGen. And the fact FutureGen is coming to Mattoon as well, there will be visitors from around the country and probably the world coming to see this activity here at the ADM facility.”
Chris Lusvardi can be reached at clusvardi@herald-review.com or 421-7972.
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