Carbon storage 'gold rush' alarms small-town Indiana
Get the Energy newsletter
Daily energy & climate — solar, EVs, oil, the policy fights and tech bets shaping the transition. Free.
- The Andersons Renewables proposed capturing CO2 from a Clymers, Indiana ethanol plant and injecting it more than 3,000 feet underground, offering residents $150 per acre annually to accept storage beneath their properties.
- 45Q tax credit offers $85 per ton of point-source carbon stored, and Enverus analyst Brad Johnston says a "huge wave" of dozens of projects is about to receive EPA and state approval, with credit revenue potentially rivaling ethanol sales.
- Indiana state law effectively strips individual landowners of the right to reject CCS proposals, turning Clymers into an epicenter of national opposition organized with help from the Citizens Action Coalition.
- The Trump administration kept the 45Q credit intact — worth roughly $17 million annually for a modest 200,000-ton-per-year project — even while canceling other climate programs and calling the climate crisis "a hoax."
- Two prior incidents cited as evidence of CCS risks: a 2024 leak at the nation's first commercial carbon-capture project under an Illinois aquifer (prompting a state ban on new projects over that aquifer) and a 2020 Mississippi pipeline rupture that hospitalized 45 people and forced 200 to evacuate.
- MIT professor Charles Harvey, who co-founded one of the world's first carbon-sequestering companies in the early 2000s, now publicly opposes the strategy and compared his regret to J. Robert Oppenheimer's over the atomic bomb.
- Marathon Oil was a partial owner of The Andersons Renewables at the time the Clymers project was proposed, illustrating how oil-industry firms sponsor ethanol-plant CCS ventures eligible for the same credits used by frackers.
Why it matters: Indiana landowners have little legal recourse to block projects that can earn sponsors $17 million or more per site in 45Q credits, so a public subsidy the Trump administration preserved is funneling billions to oil-industry-backed ventures while even early CCS pioneers like MIT's Charles Harvey now call the strategy "the stupidest way to reduce emissions."
