Taxpayer-Funded Illinois Carbon Capture Project Captures Only A Tenth Of

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Another day, another massive pile of tax dollars flushed down the toilet.

According to a report, a government-funded carbon capture project in Illinois, “the largest demonstration of its kind in the United States,” captured only a small percentage of their emissions.

Ethanol producer Archer Daniels Midland received $281 million from the EPA to capture their carbon emissions and store them deep underground.

Here’s how the project works:

The ADM plant in Decatur, Illinois, turns corn into ethanol and was the first large scale industrial facility in the US to permanently store carbon dioxide underground, where it is injected into a sandstone formation saturated with saltwater hundreds of feet below ground. In most cases, the captured carbon dioxide is injecting underground to force more oil out of wells that are nearly depleted, a process known as ‘enhanced oil recovery.’

And for all those millions, they only managed to capture between 10% and 12% of their emissions.

William Burns, a founder of the Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal at American University and a visiting professor at Northwestern University, noted that even the modest amount of CO2 stored at the ADM plant in Illinois was only achieved with the help of massive taxpayer subsidies. ‘We’ve been providing these subsidies for a long time — billions and billions of taxpayer dollars — and we still have very little to show for it,’ he said.

This program seems to be such a cash cow that there are currently 130 applications to drill similar wells around the country.