The carbon dioxide pipeline route proposed by Navigator CO2 Ventures LLC is shown.

The carbon dioxide pipeline route proposed by Navigator CO2 Ventures LLC is shown.

Navigator CO2 Ventures, the company behind a proposed carbon dioxide capture pipeline that would traverse Bremer, Fayette and Buchanan Counties has “robust” safety measures and is willing to train plant workers and first-responders, said Vice-President of Government and Public Affairs Elizabeth Burns-Thompson.

She spoke about safety and negotiating with landowners in an interview last week with the Daily Register. The company will hold public meetings in Oelwein and other counties on the route next week.

The public meetings are required before the company can proceed with negotiations with landowners for its proposed Heartland Greenway pipeline, which will go through southeast Fayette County near the ethanol plant east of Fairbank, also crossing neighboring Buchanan and Bremer counties.

Navigator signed a letter of intent to provide carbon capture, utilization and storage services for about five million metric tons of POET’s biogenic CO2 from 18 facilities annually through the Heartland Greenway system, Navigator and POET said in a June statement.

Founded in 1987, POET has grown from a single bioprocessing facility in Scotland, South Dakota, to the world’s largest producer of biofuel and a global leader in sustainable bioproducts.

Think of the CO2 transit system as a bus system that will take the liquefied compound from points A to B, Burns-Thompson said.

“Each of the plants are effectively buying a bus ticket — called a tariff charge — for each ton of CO2 that they put on the line,” she said. “Then we as the infrastructure company are entrusted with the safe and efficient transportation of that CO2 on behalf of the company from point A to point B.”

A federal tax credit in Internal Revenue Code 45Q allots $50 per metric ton of captured and stored carbon for facilities beginning construction before Jan. 1, 2026, per the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.

The emissions must be measured at the point of capture and injection or other use.

The Navigator Heartland Greenway system is on schedule to be operational in 2025 and is currently designed to draw carbon from plants in five Corn Belt states, South Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota, Iowa and ending in Illinois.

Sequestered carbon must go into “secure geological storage” which includes “storage at deep saline formations.” The taxpayer must repay the credit if the carbon oxide ceases to be captured or used in a qualifying manner “i.e., if it escapes into the atmosphere,” per CRS.

Navigator intends to build injection wells and pump the carbon dioxide into a saline sandstone reservoir a mile below the cap rock in the Illinois Basin near Decatur.

“We also know that we have shippers on our line who have interest in having access to some of these (for) industrial usage across our footprint.”

“There are processes that do exist in our footprint and those that don’t,” she said.

“We are looking at building out terminals across the line so that our shippers can ... ship to sequestration or ... participate in one of these valuable utilization services.

“Those are necessarily going to be like food and beverage, livestock processing, dry ice, bioeconomy, tech development.”

“Some places there’s been conversation that somehow this would end up doing enhanced oil recovery or EOR. That’s not represented across our footprint,” Burns-Thompson said.

The Navigator Heartland Greenway project will use the same underground rock layer — the Illinois Basin’s Mt. Simon Sandstone saline reservoir — that the US Department of Energy and Archer Daniels Midland used in a pilot CO2 sequestration project nearly a decade ago, Burns-Thompson said.

This permeable reservoir has an estimated CO2 storage capacity of up to 151 billion metric tons, per DOE.

“This isn’t like we’re injecting into an open cave,” Burns-Thompson said, noting the injected liquid will permeate the porous sand. “The carbon in that CO2 begins to attach to that sandstone and actually become part of the rock over time.”

CO2 is an asphyxiant and is odorless. The company is working on a unique odorant for it, materials say.

The US Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration will oversee the pipeline. The agency says it can assess civil penalties up to $75,000 for breaks per its website.

The pipe will range from 6 to 20 inches in diameter and operate at 40-80 degrees Fahrenheit and 1,300 to 2,100 psi.

The pipeline will have a maximum operating pressure of 2200, but PHMSA requires testing it at 1.25 times that, 2750 psi, and holding it for eight hours “to make sure that there isn’t any faults in the wells, in the pipes, across the line,” Burns-Thompson said.

Navigator’s carbon capture equipment that will be installed at the ethanol plants will dehydrate the CO2 from 95% pure to at least 98% pure, or purer. That’s because CO2 and water can make carbonic acid.

“Carbonic acid in the pipe could lead to corrosion,” Burns-Thompson said.

The steel pipe will be made expressly for liquid CO2. The pipeline will be five feet underground with a one- to two-foot separation from existing utilities. Three feet deep, the company will bury a red caution tape to warn third-party excavators.

A fiber-optic network will be laid along with the carbon pipeline and connected to what’s called a “supervisory control” system, a “brain” that will report abnormalities from the fiber nerve system to people staffing the control center as an early warning.

For additional mitigation, the company will be flying the line twice a month to scan for earthwork, in case workers haven’t called 811 before digging.

The Bremer County Board of Supervisors on Aug. 3 filed a written objection with the Iowa Utilities Board to the use of eminent domain for the Navigator Heartland Greenway CO2 pipeline.

Acknowledging proponents’ claim that carbon capture and storage benefits the entire public, the Bremer County Supervisors countered:

“Unlike regulated utilities, the pipeline is not granted a franchise to provide a service that benefits the entire public in a service area. ... It seems the pipeline will exclusively benefit private companies without providing a public service.”

This board also presented concerns as to the restoration of ag land, drainage and “the effects on our long-term soil health.”

“We are also concerned the loss of value on ... land used by the pipeline will be long-term, not just temporary,” they wrote.

Butler County has also filed an objection letter with the utilities board. Fayette and Buchanan counties have not as of Monday.

Pipeline meetings set Aug. 22 in Independence, Aug. 23 in Oelwein An Oelwein meeting on the …

POET Bioprocessing, which has a location in Fairbank, commented on a June letter of intent agreeing to ship captured liquefied carbon dioxide …

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