(329c) Successful Demonstration of Illinois Industrial Carbon Capture and Storage in a Saline Reservoir

This paper presents an overview and initial operating results of the Archer Daniels Midland Company’s (ADM) Illinois Industrial Carbon Capture and Storage (ICCS) project in Decatur, Illinois. In collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), ADM has completed construction of the compression and storage facilities and initiated carbon dioxide storage (sequestration) in 2017. As of March 2018, this project has safely and permanently stored approximately 640,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide deep underground.

This project has been demonstrating an integrated system for capturing carbon dioxide from an ethanol production plant and geologically storing it on site, in the Mount Simon Sandstone, a saline reservoir, which covers portions of the Midwest including central and southern Illinois. The carbon dioxideproduced is a byproduct of processing corn into fuel-grade ethanol at the ADM plant. The Illinois ICCS is the largest saline storage project in the United States. The Office of Fossil Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) manages this project, which received $141.4 million in DOE funding and another $66.5 million in private sector cost-sharing.

This is the first project to operate with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Class VI injection well permit for geological storage of carbon dioxide. This project is demonstrating cutting-edge technologies for intelligent monitoring. The lessons learned during the initial operations will be presented. Because of excellent site geological conditions, there were no significant impacts of carbon dioxide storage on the reservoir integrity, underground sources of drinking water, and induced seismicity. The impacts of carbon dioxide injection on the reservoir pressure and temperature, pressure propagation, carbon dioxide plume migration, and carbon dioxide concentrations in the sandstone formation fluids will be highlighted. Schlumberger’s computational models were used to predict the reservoir response to carbon dioxide storage. These computational model predictions were compared with the actual data observed during the site monitoring and the results will be presented.

This project site has become a promising target for researchers interested in developing advanced engineering & computational models and analytical instruments for subsurface monitoring of carbon storage. For example, at this site, under a DOE cost shared project, ADM, in collaboration with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and others, is demonstrating an intelligent monitoring system (IMS) for geologic storage and reservoir management. The status of this IMS project and its benefits to the ongoing Illinois ICCS project will be highlighted.

Successful implementation of this project could facilitate exploration of long-term carbon dioxide utilization options, such as enhanced oil recovery in the Southern Illinois Basin. Because ethanol plants produce a high purity carbon dioxide stream (i.e. low capture cost), these plants are low-hanging fruits for developing economical enhanced oil recovery projects (& related carbon dioxide pipeline infrastructure) and boosting domestic oil production to support the America First Energy Plan.