STEUBENVILLE — Representatives of Tenaska, the Omaha, Neb.-based energy company trying to develop a carbon capture and storage hub in the Tri-State Area, told the Jefferson County commissioners Thursday they’re planning a test well off county Road 58 in north-central Jefferson County.

Ali Kairys, the company’s senior director of project development, said the stratigraphic test well, one of two they plan to do in Ohio, would “provide important geologic data about the type and makeup of rock formation, depth, porosity (and) permeability of the formations.”

In addition to Jefferson County, Tenaska also intends to put one in Harrison County as well as New Cumberland .

“What it will also do is provide further confirmation that the location is suitable for long-term, safe storage” of carbon dioxide, she said, adding that they “won’t be injecting anything” during the test phase, and after a period of two to three weeks crews “will mobilize and do site restoration work.”

She said it’s possible the company might try to start the test well process in December, “but we’re most likely looking to mobilize next spring.”

Kairys told commissioners the CCS hub would “provide transportation and storage solutions for manufacturers, industrial processors and power plants, as well as others in need of carbon dioxide emission solutions.”

“These businesses, which are very critical to the local economy, are facing increasing environmental regulations that they need to cut these emissions for, domestically (and) abroad,” she said. “We will transport their processed carbon dioxide through an underground pipeline and safely and permanently store it underground in geologic formations.”

She said it’s a complex project requiring many years of permitting, “(and) based on our current timeline, the earliest (construction) start date would be a little earlier than 2028. We’ve got a couple of years in front of us here.”

Commissioners also:

• Selected the Jefferson County Land Bank to serve as lead entity for submitting and administering all grant applications for funding through the Ohio Department of Development’s Demolition and Site Revitalization program. Land Bank Director Tabatha Glover reminded commissioners they’d received nearly $965,000 through the fiscal year 2022-23 demo program and another $500,000 in FY 2024-25, and from 2014-2019 administered more than $3.4 million through the Neighborhood Initiative Program. To date, Glover said the land bank has demolished 291 blight and dilapidated structures across the county.

• Approved a near $26,223 expenditure for firewall support services, which Auditor E.J. Conn says is “a vital component of our cybersecurity.” He said the services “allow us to partition off different county departments into separate virtual networks in order to minimize (any) fallout from a potential future cyberthreat.”

• Authorized a nearly $16,600 expenditure for VM Ware virtual server support.

• Executed a resolution authorizing the regional airport authority to apply for a grant to extend parallel taxiway A lighting through the Ohio Department of Transportation’s aviation office, and their plan to hire Mindy Nash as assistant treasurer.