(The Center Square) – After legislators ignored protections to the Mahomet Aquifer last year, a bill to protect the supply from carbon sequestration is advancing at the Illinois Statehouse.
Senate Bill 1723 would provide protections for the sole-source aquifer. That’s after Senate Bill 1289, signed last year by Gov. J.B. Pritzker, put the aquifer in jeopardy. Andrew Rehn, climate policy director at Prairie Rivers Network, said they wanted the protections last year.
“But then we learned over the summer or early fall about two leaks at [Archer-Daniels-Midland’s] Decatur facility, and that’s really kind of shaken, for us, our faith in the Class VI well program, which is the program that regulates these,” said Rehn. “And then on top of that, we’ve got a new administration, a federal administration, that is unlikely to want to enforce anything that looks like environmental protection.”
President Donald Trump’s Human Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been a vocal critic of carbon capture and storage projects. Five months ago, Kennedy released a documentary called “The Pipeline Deception.”
“Opponents of the project believe that the pipelines have a hidden purpose. Those pipelines just happen to end at the Bakken Crude oil fields in North Dakota and the oil fields in Southern Illinois,” said Kennedy in the documentary. “So the CO2 can actually be used to push out every last drop of oil that is stranded in the oil fields. The purpose claimed for the pipeline by its proponents is to reduce carbon emissions, but in reality, it could actually increase the amount of carbon emitted.”
Earlier this month, U.S. Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) introduced the 45Q Repeal Act. The 45Q tax credit offers a financial incentive for companies that capture carbon dioxide from the air or from industrial processes and store it underground.
The Mahomet Aquifer is a key source of drinking water for many communities in central Illinois.
SB 1289 was largely sponsored by Democrats, but state Sens. Tom Bennett, a Republican, co-sponsored the legislation with Democrat colleague David Koehler. Koehler and Bennett represent central and east central Illinois, where the aquifer is located.
“It kind of came together last minute in some fast negotiations. There weren’t really Mahomet legislators in the room, and the area wasn’t really well aware of it,” said Rehn.
State Sen. Chapin Rose, R-Mahomet, used profanities on the Senate floor last year when opposing SB 1289.
Rehn was asked if he thinks carbon capture will be halted under the new Trump administration.
“It is unwise to predict anything out of the Trump administration, but it does seem like right now they are not going to touch the 45Q tax credit, which is incentivizing all of the sequestration. So all of those projects are still in the queue,” said Rehn. “I could even see a world in which they would get accelerated by the Trump administration, because it’s a lot of projects that big companies like British Petroleum support. So people who the Trump administration likes support these projects.”
Under President Joe Biden, the 45Q tax credit, originally introduced as part of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, was expanded as part of his broader climate agenda. Rehn said water comes before purported climate solutions.
“They’re not going to capture all the CO2. And there’s a lot we can do to reduce carbon emissions in an equivalent way without sequestering carbon,” said Rehn. “So take the money that we’re paying these companies in the form of tax credits and instead incentivize companies to build more renewable energy.”
SB 1723 and House Bill 3614 both head to the floor for further consideration. HB 3614 says no person shall conduct a carbon sequestration activity within a sequestration facility that overlies, underlies, or passes through a sole-source aquifer.
