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The plan to bury carbon under remote Indiana farmland is supposed to be a slam dunk for the climate, according to its supporters – all generously funded by US tax dollars.
But as far as Melissa Harrison and some other residents of Clymers, Indiana, are concerned, it just might be the end of their town. “This is our place,” she says. Generations of her family are buried in the cemetery, and she is raising her five grandchildren in one of several dozen white-clapboard homes among corn fields and industrial plants serving the farming industry.
Now a local ethanol plant has spearheaded a project to bury vast stores of carbon deep in the geologic formation that runs under the town and surrounding farms.
The government subsidies for the plan, which is supposed to help prevent global heating, are so generous that companies all over the country have been rushing to get permission for similar projects.
But residents around some of these carbon sequestration projects are organizing to stop them, making Clymers an epicenter of emerging national tensions around these projects.
While international climate monitors say carbon sequestration projects could be secondary tools to help contain global warming, they also say the main focus must be on urgent and deep cuts to fossil fuels. Some environmental groups question the benefits of carbon sequestration and are concerned it could delay the transition to clean energy and pose risks to surrounding communities.
Harrison said the town of Clymers is already overburdened by hazards from industrial agriculture facilities including a fertilizer supplier, a hazardous waste recycling company and the giant ethanol plant that is proposing the project. She said the community faces contaminated well water, a lack of sewage facilities and high poverty rates.
Warmly remembered as once having been a thriving “heartland” community with a beautiful white church, two grocery stores, a Chevy dealer and a diner, the town is now struggling. Its school is closed; the old Methodist church has been demolished and the playground is surrounded by fertilizer tanks on trailers, which the fertilizer company rents to nearby farms.
Harrison, like other residents in the area, received a letter about the project. Some were asked to accept $150 a year in exchange for having the carbon sink under their properties.
“If they make Clymers bad enough that no one wants to live here, they can take over the whole town, real cheap,” she said.
In a statement to the Guardian, the company proposing the project, the Andersons Renewables, said it “is a safe, established technology, with a rigorous permitting, engineering, and monitoring process to protect groundwater, public health, and the surrounding environment”.
“The proposed project would capture carbon dioxide from the ethanol production process, compress it, and then inject it deep underground, more than 3,000 feet, into geologic formations identified for permanent storage,” said the statement.
“We were able to determine the site’s suitability through seismic analysis and by drilling a test well,” it added.
The company, which was partly owned by a subsidiary of Marathon Oil at the time it proposed the project, said in its statement that it understands why residents might be concerned, but it plans to work transparently with the community to allay those worries.
The undertaking is one of dozens of carbon sequestration projects expected to be given the green light for construction in the US by the Environmental Protection Agency and state environmental regulators in the next year – as a flood of corporate permit applications reach the end of their approval processes. Oil industry companies are often sponsors and benefactors of these projects.
Carbon sequestration involves capturing industrial CO2 emissions that would normally be vented to the atmosphere before they can contribute to global heating, and burying them in rock formations thousands of feet underground for what proponents say is permanent storage.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said carbon capture storage (CCS) 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. Both Democratic and Republican presidential administrations have supported such plans in past years. The Biden administration authorized a lucrative tax credit reimbursement program for them as part of the Inflation Reduction Act.
The Trump administration, which has called the climate crisis “a hoax” and canceled funding for many other types of climate projects, continued this tax credit, which often benefits energy companies that are already using underground technology such as fracking. It offers companies $85 in transferable tax credits for each ton of point-source carbon stored – a bounty that has 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 each year, the tax credits could be hugely profitable, said Brad Johnston, an analyst with Enverus, an energy industry market research company and data company that tracks permits for this type of project. Many are proposed for ethanol plants, which emit a nearly pure stream of CO2, making their emissions simpler to capture and put underground.
While only a handful of projects are operating, a “huge wave” is about to be approved, Johnston said.
Experts say the money brought in to these companies by tax credits from these carbon projects can rival the revenues from selling the actual ethanol itself, thereby potentially doubling a plant’s earnings.
Many environmental groups criticize the projects, saying they merely subsidize oil and gas industry companies and don’t reliably cut emissions at scale.
For instance, a small project that sequesters 200,000 metric tons of carbon per year can earn $17m annually through a tax credit called 45Q. Larger projects plan to sequester tens of millions of tons of carbon, said Kerwin Olson, executive director of the Indiana group Citizens Action Coalition, which has helped residents in the state organize against the many projects proposed there.
“You can do the math,” he said. “That is a lot of cash – an enormous amount of cash.”
“You’re talking billions of dollars.”
Environmental experts say the risks of carbon storage include earthquakes, water table contamination and potentially deadly carbon leaks, and point to several cases where carbon has leaked.
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. The state subsequently banned new CCS projects under one of the state’s biggest aquifers.
In 2020, a pipeline carrying carbon dioxide ruptured in rural Mississippi, creating a mass poisoning that resulted in 45 people being hospitalized and 200 evacuated. Emergency responders found people lying on the ground unable to breathe and didn’t know what was happening. “It looked like you were going through the zombie apocalypse,” Jack Willingham, emergency director for the affected county, told NPR.
Charles Harvey, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT, helped to start one of the world’s first companies devoted to sequestering carbon to prevent global heating in the early 2000s. But since then, he has become a staunch opponent of the strategy, and acknowledged experiencing guilt akin to what J Robert Oppenheimer felt over inventing the atomic bomb.
“It’s just the stupidest way to reduce emissions,” said Harvey. Oil companies are lobbying hard for the projects, he said, but he believes CO2 emissions could be best tackled if the money was spent on renewable energy.
“It is loved by the industry because it’s a subsidy for whatever they’re already doing,” he said.
Johnston, the Enverus analyst, said that, given the setbacks caused by the Illinois leaks, his sense was that companies were being extra careful to engineer their projects to avoid any further problems.
“I think any additional setback from a leak or a failure of one of these wells would be pretty detrimental to the CCS industry,” he said. “So I think a lot of these operators are very diligent about doing it right and probably overbuilding a lot of these systems.”
The Clymers project’s sponsoring companies called a meeting of residents and landowners in the area and told them that the carbon storage was perfectly safe and couldn’t leak.
“I said that’s bullcrap. I’m worried about my well,” said farmer Dennis Crume, who refused to sign the form offering him $150 an acre to accept the plan. But Indiana state law essentially strips individual landowners of the right to reject these proposals, experts say.
Crume grows soybeans and corn on several plots of land skirting Clymers, some of which he leases from other owners. He raises a few cows in a grassy field behind his house and tries to grow everything his family eats in his garden. But he worries about the pollution he sees cropping up all around him.
“I’m trying to look out for our grandkids,” said Crume, who has 11 of them living nearby. “We’ve got to do something for the environment.”
