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[quote=Anonymous]There are thousands of miles of CO2 pipelines in the US; they transport CO2 that is extracted from underground formations to these depleted oil wells, and have been doing this since the 1970s.  It is safe and the CO2 will stay there if it's injected into the right spot.

There is a tax credit that pays $35/ton for carbon sequestered into depleted wells and used to extract more oil; $50/ton for dedicated storage in a saline reservoir.  The new legislation is poised to up this and so prepare to see a lot more projects.  so should the public be subsidizing EOR to this extent, given that it produces more oil?  That would seem to be greenwashing to me.  Also a configuration of this that supports the ethanol industry is questionable.  (FWIW I went to a public hearing of the Iowa public utility board on this project and they said the CO2 would be used for dedicated storage, not EOR.)

But the fact is that we need to put carbon back underground.  See the IPCC special report on 1.5 degrees.  To meet the 1.5C temperature target, we have to remove 100 billion - 1 trillion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere over the century.  That is not accomplishable with just planting more trees because of the land demands.  Soil carbon / regenerative ag is another wedge but eventually these land-based carbon sinks get filled up.  Then you have to keep the carbon there but you're not sequestering more year on year.  We need some version of industrial projects and infrastructure for it.  Whether we need the specific version that Summit or Navigator or whatever this midwestern ethanol plan is, is questionable, but we will need to build a lot of pipelines and injection wells if we want to limit warming to safer levels.  Problem is that most people have never heard of any of this stuff and will not see the need for it.  It is too bad because there could be opportunities for good jobs in rural areas and for former fossil fuel workers if we did it right.

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