Farm country critics balk at carbon capture projects, citing health risks of “grand experiment”

Julie Fosdick’s farm in Logan County, Illinois, has been in the family for almost 200 years, but it wasn’t until recently that it started attracting attention for its potential to make other people money. With 200 acres of mostly corn and soybeans that she manages for her four siblings, she’s drawn “a constant barrage” of offers from people interested in populating her land with solar panels or wind turbines. 

In 2020, though, she was approached with a proposal she had not yet encountered. A petroleum company wanted to drill a Class VI injection well on neighboring farmland that would have filled the area beneath her property with carbon dioxide (CO2). Condensed into liquid form, it could remain safely underground, she was told, where it couldn’t escape into the atmosphere and exacerbate climate change. The company sought an easement to use her subterranean pore space. She declined.

Carbon capture and sequestration, as the process is called, has been widely touted as a solution to the climate crisis, reducing CO2 emissions from power plants and industrial facilities that contribute to increasingly erratic and dangerous weather patterns.

“Everything we were told was how wonderful this whole thing was and that it was going to save the planet,” Fosdick said. 

After years spent learning about the practice, though, she said that couldn’t be much further from the truth. Carbon capture is an unproven technology, a corporate cash grab, and an environmental hazard for her community, according to Fosdick. The practice is poised to accelerate in Illinois, whose geologic formations are particularly suitable for long-term carbon storage. But Fosdick is among a growing chorus of skeptics of the technology who are pushing back against it.

Critics cite multiple potential risks, including dangerous pipeline leaks, poisoned aquifers, and even earthquakes due to the underground pressure created by stored carbon.

A “grand experiment”

“The carbon capture industry has existed as a pilot project for a long time, and those pilot projects showed us that this technology isn’t scalable, doesn’t actually work well for its stated goal of addressing the climate crisis, and has also exposed significant health and safety risks,” said Jim Walsh, policy director at the nonprofit Food & Water Watch. 

Despite those concerns, “projects are moving forward at breakneck speed,” he said.

A Biden-era hike in the value of carbon capture tax credits sparked a rush of interest from companies eager to secure $85 for each metric ton pumped deep into the earth. Now, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is in the midst of reviewing permits for 27 wells across Illinois and 200 wells nationally, nearly half of which were submitted in the past 12 months, according to the agency’s tracker. Anticipated approvals in Illinois would rapidly expand the scope of the industry against the will of community members worried about their own safety. 

“Everyone in Central Illinois is at risk for this grand experiment they want to do to say they can pull carbon dioxide out of the air,” Fosdick said.

The Heartland Greenway Vervain Project that sought to stash CO2 in the porous rock thousands of feet beneath Fosdick’s land was named for a prairie wildflower. It’s one of nine distinct proposals in Illinois awaiting the EPA’s green light, most of which would feature multiple wells. (Navigator CO2, the company behind the project, canceled it in 2023, citing an “unpredictable” regulatory process, but the EPA indicates its permit is still under technical review.) 

Opponents of the growing industry say the threats to public health and safety without sufficient evidence of success do not justify expansion. 

The country’s first permitted Class VI well — at food processing powerhouse Archer Daniels Midland’s corn-processing plant in nearby Decatur — experienced multiple leaks in 2024 that the EPA said violated the Safe Drinking Water Act. 

ADM failed to alert the public or state and local officials to the 2024 leaks at its Decatur facility, even as it petitioned the city for an easement to expand its operations and as the state negotiated its first carbon capture regulations, the Safe CCS Act. 

Those leaks stoked concern among residents and environmentalists that was already heightened by a 2020 pipeline rupture in Sitartia, Mississippi, that hospitalized at least 45 people and forced the evacuation of more than 200. 

ADM is now seeking to add additional wells and sequester up to 2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year beneath Lake Decatur. That CO2 would come from a Broadwing Energy natural gas plant as part of a deal with Google to secure a “clean energy future” for the tech giant’s data centers. 

When asked about the community concerns, an ADM spokesman said the company is “confident in the safety, security, and effectiveness of carbon capture and storage … as a greenhouse gas mitigation technology …” that can be economically beneficial for the area. The company cited “inaccurate information circulating causing confusion and undue concern,” and said it is working to “help the public understand the scientific facts behind this important technology.”

The carbon capture industry’s development in Illinois has been slowed by a two-year moratorium on the pipelines needed to transport carbon dioxide, but that moratorium expires in July, opening the door to a sudden surge of activity that has community members fearful of what’s to come.

“We don’t want to be anybody’s sacrifice zone,” said Don Carlson of Illinois People’s Action, which has been fighting both the wells and the pipelines necessary for carbon capture to take off. 

Health hazards

Carbon capture isn’t a new technology. It’s been used for decades in a process called enhanced oil recovery, in which carbon dioxide is removed from industrial exhaust streams using chemical solvents, compressed into liquid form, then injected into oil fields to squeeze out every last drop. The vast majority of carbon dioxide being captured in the US is deployed in this manner. The nascent boom uses the same means for different ends.

In Illinois, where the enormous corn crop provides fodder for more than a dozen ethanol plants, there’s a ready supply of carbon dioxide byproduct that can be pumped underground to offset carbon footprints and secure hefty tax credits. Those credits, which tallied $3 billion in 2025, could soon exceed $60 billion annually as the industry takes off, according to one independent analysis. 

Rather than using carbon capture for oil recovery, companies like ADM instead seek to inject the ethanol byproduct into the pores in the Mount Simon sandstone formation, which sits beneath a caprock layer of Eau Claire shale hundreds of feet thick. Beneath the caprock, the industry argues, the CO2 will be locked in place and will eventually become inert centuries down the line. 

But the same pressure that allows captured carbon to push oil from a well has also prompted concerns about the possibility of earthquakes that could result from the industry’s rapid expansion, Fosdick said. 

Meanwhile, the porous rock that makes Illinois an attractive site for storage is filled not with open air pockets but with briny, saline water that forms carbonic acid when it interacts with CO2. 

This acidified environment can cause heavy metals to leach out of the rock, according to Ted Schettler, the science director of the Science and Environmental Health Network, who has provided testimony about carbon capture pipelines proposed in North Dakota and Iowa. Any crack in the geologic formation could allow both heavy metals and carbonic acid to escape — a particular concern for wells placed near aquifers that provide drinking water to Illinois residents, he said. 

“They claim our rock formations are just perfect for sequestering CO2 because there is no way there can be a problem,” said Verlyn Rosenberger, a retired teacher in Decatur who has organized with Illinois People’s Action. “Well, there’s already been a problem.”

As Schettler explains, carbon dioxide — colorless, odorless and heavier than oxygen — can quickly create an emergency when released into the atmosphere, hovering low to the ground and confusing bystanders who don’t realize they’re breathing toxic air. At 4% concentration, it causes distressed breathing and is immediately dangerous to life and health, according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. 

At higher levels, it causes dimmed eyesight, impaired hearing, sweating, tremors, increased heart rate and blood pressure and, eventually, unconsciousness, Schettler said. Because of its invisibility, exposed residents wouldn’t know which way to run to get away from a leak, he adds. Cars with internal combustion engines wouldn’t start, complicating any escape or rescue. With notable failures despite the industry’s small footprint, Schettler worries that expansion will only make leaks, ruptures, and other crises more common.

“The ADM story tells us this isn’t just theoretical,” he said.

Tip of the iceberg

As the EPA begins greenlighting the industry’s expansion, carbon capture opponents say their environmental and public health concerns are amplified by a regulatory system unsuited to handle the surge of activity. There are currently no federal regulations specific to carbon dioxide pipelines. Instead, CO2 pipelines are regulated by oil and gas standards, which Carlson, of Illinois People’s Action, describes as “apples and oranges.” 

The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, which regulates pipelines, announced a notice of proposed rulemaking in January 2025 “to include safety standards and reporting requirements for gas- and liquid-phase carbon dioxide pipelines.” It would have been a step forward, but the Trump administration withdrew that proposal in its first days. 

“We’re building pipelines that everyone recognizes are not adequately regulated to ensure protection of communities, but we’re not actually moving forward any regulations to help protect those communities,” said Walsh, of Food & Water Watch. “And the fossil fuel industry and the carbon capture industry are taking advantage of those regulatory gaps to build these projects now.”

In that environment, Illinois has become “a testing ground,” according to Pam Richart of the Champaign-based nonprofit Eco-Justice Collaborative. A proactive response from communities in the path of proposed wells and pipelines has already made a difference, she said. In addition to the state’s pipeline moratorium — the second in the country, following California — the Safe CCS Act, passed in 2024, requires pipeline developers to use comprehensive modeling to identify impact areas and analyze risk, including how first responders will navigate a leak. It also added safety standards that the Illinois Commerce Commission, which permits pipelines in the state, must consider. 

The state also banned carbon sequestration near the Mahomet Aquifer, which provides drinking water to more than 500,000 people. Advocates are now pushing for a bill in the state Senate that would ban the use of eminent domain for carbon dioxide pipelines.   

“The best way to move forward would be to eliminate the public subsidies for this industry and to outlaw the further development of carbon dioxide pipelines and injection wells,” Walsh said. “They’re not helpful for anything other than increasing the profits of oil and gas companies.”

In the meantime, proposals keep advancing through the process. On April 10, the EPA issued a permit to Marquis Inc., which operates an ethanol plant in Hennepin, to inject up to 9 million metric tons of carbon dioxide over a six-year period. It was the first Class VI permit issued in Illinois since ADM’s — and it was exempted from the requirements of the 2024 bill because it was far enough along in the process, Richart said. 

Other projects are counting down the days until the pipeline moratorium expires. In neighboring McLean and Ford counties, ethanol manufacturer One Earth Energy has sought approval for a seven-mile pipeline and three wells that would store up to 4.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. The McLean County board denied its permit application in 2023, but the company plans to make a second push this year. Its CEO said in a recent report that the company is preparing for July 1 — the day the moratorium expires. 

Neither Marquis nor One Earth responded to requests for comment for this story.

Brent Lage is among a group of farmers who have stopped selling their corn to One Earth, despite its relatively high payments and the shrinking prices farmers are receiving for their crop these days. He farms on rented land that’s in the pathway of the proposed pipeline and lives with his four sons a couple miles from one of the proposed wells. The ethanol boom has been good to Illinois’ corn farmers, he said, but he worries that carbon capture is little more than a way to prop up an industry on its way out. 

Lage knows the future of carbon capture is about more than just his farm or his community — or even just his state.

“This isn’t just one little project in one small community trying to get going,” he said. “How many wells are proposed in Illinois? How many more wells will keep coming forward nonstop if these projects get rolling? This is a massive thing they want to happen. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.”

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