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The country's first permitted carbon dioxide injection well is in Decatur, Ill. Tenaska representatives, who took the photo on a visit to ADM's site, use it in their marketing materials to show landowners the footprint of such a facility. Tenaska is planning to drill between 14 and 20 such wells in the tri-state area.
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Tenaska and EQT say carbon storage will be ready within a decade

Courtesy of Tenaska

Tenaska and EQT say carbon storage will be ready within a decade

Both Tenaska and EQT Corp. are cautiously moving ahead with plans to develop carbon storage projects in the region, the two companies’ representatives said during a recent conference at Washington and Jefferson College.

More is known about Tenaska’s project, the Tri-State CCS Hub, than about EQT’s work on the matter. The Nebraska-based energy company is forecasting it will need 26 carbon dioxide injection wells across three states to provide enough underground storage space for 5 million metric tons of CO2 annually. Only three of those wells would be in Pennsylvania, in Washington County, if the geology is right, said Bret Estep, Tenaska’s vice president of development.

But geology is only one slice of the pie.

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“What we have here is a really complicated project,” Mr. Estep said. The task isn’t just to figure out if it’s feasible, “but is it commercially practical?”

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“This is a project that will take us years to develop,” he said. Tenaska projects it could be operational by the end of the decade.

EQT has not disclosed its timeline. The company is still considering the scope of its carbon storage ambitions, said John Litynski, program director for carbon storage and sequestration.

Mr. Litynski, who spent two decades with the Department of Energy working on carbon storage, joined the natural gas company last year and is building out a team, according to job postings in recent months.

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He said that whatever shape EQT’s carbon storage program takes, the company plans to have injection wells available within the next five to 10 years, which is when clients in heavy industry and power generation will need them, he said.

EQT is one of the leading players in the ARCH2 project, a multi-state federally-supported initiative aiming to make hydrogen out of natural gas, with the resulting CO2 emissions captured and sequestered. EQT’s proposed project for the hub is a facility that will make the hydrogen and turn it into low-carbon aviation fuel and other liquid fuels. To make this happen, EQT would need a place to dump its carbon.

But the CO2 emissions from hydrogen production would be just a sliver of possible emissions in need of storage in southwestern Pennsylvania, Mr. Litynski said.

“We really see this as a bigger, broader opportunity for the region — and not just for the region — to be able to utilize natural gas that we produce,” he said, and for industrial plants, like cement and steel, to remain in operation here once there is a local option for getting rid of their carbon emissions.

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Mr. Litynski also said he thinks that CO2 could be used for enhanced recovery in local shale gas wells, just as it has been used to coax more oil from wells in Texas and nearby states, which host nearly all of the 5,000 miles of CO2 pipelines currently operating in the U.S.

Safety questions

Speakers at Monday’s conference fielded several questions about the safety of such pipelines and of CO2 storage wells, especially in the wake of recent news that the country’s first commercial carbon storage project in Illinois was found to have a significant leak from its storage reservoir.

The facility, where The Archer-Daniels-Midland Co. captures carbon dioxide from its corn-processing plants and pumps it into a reservoir more than 5,000 feet underground, was cited by the the Environmental Protection Agency in August, which found that liquid carbon dioxide has migrated from the formation where it was injected into another one that lies on top of it, but not all the way up to the surface. Archer Daniels disclosed it found corrosion on one of its monitoring wells.

Panel members said they will follow the lessons learned from this incident and some suspected that federal regulators might use it as a prompt to update or revise requirements around such wells.

Carbon dioxide injection wells are permitted by the federal government, except in states granted authority, or primacy, over the process. Pennsylvania is in the process of applying for this authority, but until that is granted — it is expected to take several years — the Environmental Protection Agency will be responsible for fielding local projects as they materialize.

There are currently 150 such well applications under review by the agency, more than a third filed within the past year.

None have been filed for Pennsylvania, although the state Department of Environmental Protection received an application from Archaea Energy, now a subsidiary of BP, to drill a test well on a site of a landfill gas processing project in Lackawanna County. 

It is likely that Tenaska will be the first company to test the waters in Pennsylvania. Mr. Estep said the project is slated to file for injection permits for its Pennsylvania project, dubbed Oak Grove, during the first quarter of 2025. It has already submitted an application to the EPA for a chunk in Ohio and will file several more in the coming months.

He predicted more storage developers will materialize soon.

Some may have been sitting on the sidelines waiting for Pennsylvania to pass legislation governing some of the more contentious issues around carbon storage.

In July, Gov. Josh Shapiro signed the legislation which answered three of their biggest questions. The law states that pore space, i.e. the empty pockets in the rock layers where CO2 would be stored, belongs to whoever owns the surface property. That will be who companies approach for leases. It also established that developers would need to secure landowner consent for 75% of a unit’s acreage in order to proceed with a project. Critically, the legislation also says that 50 years after CO2 injection ends at a facility, the state would take over ownership of the CO2 and the responsibility for it, releasing the project owner from liability if conditions are met.

Mr. Estep said Tenaska is not in a hurry to tie up leases for pore space, although it has approached landowners in southwestern Pennsylvania.

“Our plan is, we get the well sites, get that permitting going, then we go out and slowly start aggregating pore space out there,” he said.

He seemed equally casual about being able to secure customers for the project. The company has signed a preliminary agreement with an ethanol producer in Ohio and is talking to others, Mr. Estep said.

“Right now, [there’s] a little bit of a chicken and egg kind of dance going on,” he said.

The existing emitters, like cement and steel plants, power plants and gas processing plants, need to spend money to outfit their smokestacks with carbon capture technology. Tenaska has to invest the capital into building out a place for that captured carbon to go.

“We’re just continuing to walk closer and closer to each other,” he said.

Then there are the emitters that haven’t been built yet, he said, like natural gas-derived hydrogen and ammonia facilities, and new natural gas power plants.

“Those folks are really knocking our door down and saying, ‘Can we tie up all of your pore space? Because we're going to build a new combined cycle that's almost totally driven by AI power demands.’”

“There’s a real resurgence in natural gas-fired generation,” Mr. Estep said.

First Published: October 23, 2024, 4:05 p.m.
Updated: October 24, 2024, 12:27 p.m.

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The country's first permitted carbon dioxide injection well is in Decatur, Ill. Tenaska representatives, who took the photo on a visit to ADM's site, use it in their marketing materials to show landowners the footprint of such a facility. Tenaska is planning to drill between 14 and 20 such wells in the tri-state area.
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The country's first permitted carbon dioxide injection well is in Decatur, Ill. Tenaska representatives, who took the photo on a visit to ADM's site, use it in their marketing materials to show landowners the footprint of such a facility. Tenaska is planning to drill between 14 and 20 such wells in the tri-state area.  (Courtesy of Tenaska)
Courtesy of Tenaska
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