Lake County wants to store their waste...
Under Our Feet
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In October of 2022, contractors for BP began working in Benton County performing seismic tests to inventory the characteristics and carbon dioxide (CO2) storage capacity of the sandstone layer beneath Benton County. This seismic testing continued through fall of 2023. BP is interested in this layer of sandstone because they want to transport, via pipeline, CO2 generated in Whiting, IN and permanently store it in the porous space of our geologic sandstone layer. This transportation of Lake County’s waste leaves Benton County residents at risk for:
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Tremors/Earthquakes
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Disruption of growing cycle for farm crops
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Contaminated Water
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CO2 Poisoning
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No permanent solution to this problem
... and more
Join The Fight
Contact your County Commissioner
John Fields
District I Commissioner
Mike Freeland
District II Commissioner
Bryan Berry
District III Commissioner
Please direct questions and comments to
What is Carbon Sequestration?
Carbon Capture & Sequestration is the process of capturing carbon dioxide emission from large point resources, transporting it to storage sites and depositing the CO into deep underground rock formations.
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"Carbon capture and sequestration often do not happen at the same place and require pipelines to transport the carbon dioxide to wherever it will be sequestered..."
Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) projects essentially consist of three parts. First is carbon capture, in which carbon dioxide emitted from facilities is captured before entering the atmosphere. Next, the collected carbon dioxide is turned into a part-gas, part-liquid substance called a supercritical fluid. Finally, the supercritical carbon dioxide is injected deep underground.
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Carbon capture and sequestration often do not happen at the same place and require pipelines to transport the carbon dioxide to wherever it will be sequestered, usually depleted oil and gas reservoirs, deep saline reservoirs and coal seams that cannot be mined.
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BP has begun looking at Benton County as a possible home for a CCS project that would store carbon dioxide from its Whiting Refinery in Lake County.
Source: IndianaEnvironmentalReporter.org
For more information contact your Benton County Commissioners:
From Jon Charlesworth, ANR Educator with Purdue Extension - Benton County
Neither BP nor “The Industry” Has 5 Decades of Experience with Permanent Geologic Carbon Storage.
Injection of Carbon Dioxide (CO 2 ) for permanent geologic storage requires a class VI permit from the US
Environmental Protection Agency. Until recently, the ADM ethanol plant near Decatur Illinois was the
only facility in the US that had an active class VI permit. In January of 2024, Wabash Carbon Services
near Terre Haute, IN had the status of their class VI permit moved from ‘pending’ to ‘active’ thus
becoming only the second class VI permit in ‘active’ status. A listing of class VI permits in active and
pending status can be tracked at this website:
https://www.epa.gov/uic/table-epas-draft-and-final-class-vi-well-permits
You can keep track of the status of all Class VI permit submissions as they clear the various hurdles in
the EPA permitting process at this site: https://www.epa.gov/uic/current-class-vi-projects-under-review-epa
Note that as of today’s date (2/19/2024) BP has not yet submitted anything to the EPA for their
proposed carbon injection project in Benton and surrounding counties.
The ADM plant near Decatur Illinois has been actively injecting CO 2 for approximately 5 years. The first
three years, the injection was done at a rate of 0.3 million tons of CO 2 per year. I assume this is a
cautiously slow rate as it is 1/3 the rate at which they are now injecting. Their current injection rate of
one million tons of CO 2 per year is the figure BP representatives have mentioned as the rate they want
to operate at for each injection well in Benton County. Not one million tons of CO 2 combined, one
million tons in each injection well. This article from the Times of NW Indiana reports that BP plans to
inject 23 million tons of CO 2 per year into wells in our area (Benton, White, Jasper and Newton
Counties).
https://www.nwitimes.com/life-entertainment/local/department-of-energy-provides-98-million-for-
carbon-storage-hub-at-bp-whiting-refinery/article_4477185a-840d-11ee-8bdb-375f681258d8.html
I have attended several presentations by BP representatives and they always tout their industry’s five
decades of experience with carbon sequestration as part of their claim that the process has proven to be
safe. Neither BP nor the industry as a whole has five decades of experience with carbon sequestration.
The first class VI permit has been active for only about 5 years. What the industry does have fifty years
of experience with is the practice of injecting various substances (including CO 2 ) down into a depleting
oil well to enhance the amount of oil that can be recovered. This process is called ‘Enhanced Oil
Recovery’ and permits for this process are covered by EPA class II permits.
https://www.epa.gov/uic/class-ii-oil-and-gas-related-injection-wells
Enhanced oil recovery is the practice of pushing fluids consisting of brine, freshwater, steam, polymers or carbon dioxide down into oil-bearing formations to recover residual oil. One substance goes down, another substance comes up. Geologic CO 2 sequestration is, we hope and pray, one-way. The CO 2 is injected with the expectation that it stays put until the end of time. Enhanced Oil Recovery and Geologic CO 2 Sequestration are NOT the same thing. They are treated very differently by the EPA and have their own EPA permit class designations. If they were very similar, I assume the EPA would classify them as IIa and IIb. But this is not the case, the EPA permits them as class II and class VI. Lumping these two practices in together and trying to pass then off as being the same thing is, at best, disingenuous. But let’s face it, if you want to talk people into going along with something that seems experimental and risky, it sounds better if you can claim a safety track record of five decades rather than five years.