Food processing giant Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM) is set to become one of the first US companies to attempt to capture and store its carbon emissions, confirming it is working on a major carbon sequestration project at one of its facilities in Illinois.
The company said it has teamed up with the Midwest Geological Sequestration Consortium (MGSC) and the Illinois State Geological Survey (ISGS) to work on the project which aims to capture emissions from ADM’s bio-ethanol plant in Decatur, Illinois. The carbon dioxide will then be stored underground in the region's Mount Simon Sandstone, a saline-water-bearing rock formation which geologists believe is capable of storing carbon dioxide in tiny spaces in the rock.
The $84.3m project is scheduled to begin this spring with environmental monitoring of the rock starting in the autumn. The company plans to begin the sequestration and injection of compressed liquid-like carbon dioxide in October 2009 and hopes to store one million tons of carbon dioxide over three years.
"Our goal for this project is to further demonstrate [carbon storage's] safety and effectiveness," said Robert Finley, director of the ISGS Energy and Earth Resources Center, adding that deep saline rock formations, like the Mount Simon Sandstone, offered the greatest potential for sequestration of large volumes of carbon dioxide.
A spokeswoman for ADM, which has invested heavily in biofuels over recent years, said that the company was assessing a range of technologies for further limiting the environmental footprint of biofuels and regarded carbon capture as one such important technology.
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