Recently, I attended an open-house meeting about carbon capture and sequestration. This process would capture carbon dioxide emissions from various industries and power plants and transport it through pipelines to our area to be injected underground — under our homes, farms, etc. The meeting was held in Cadiz and hosted by the Nebraska-based company Tenaska. There was no PowerPoint presentation and no explanation of the process — instead, attendees were encouraged to ask questions of Tenaska employees who were stationed beside bulletin boards surrounding the room.

The open-house format provided little opportunity to get an in-depth account of this very technical process. As a retired teacher, I can say that it is impossible to ask questions when you have little to no background information on a topic, especially one that is as technical as CCS. Other attendees expressed their frustration with the meeting, along with their concerns about the safety of CCS.

Tenaska has been in our area for at least a year, attempting to get large acreage land-owners to sign leases that will allow for the storage of high-pressure, super-critical, carbon dioxide in pore spaces located thousands of feet under their property. “Tenaska plans to develop, construct and operate 24 CO2 injection wells across six Appalachian counties, including Carroll, Jefferson and Harrison counties in Ohio.”

This company is receiving more than $55 million to construct a carbon capture and sequestration hub (the Tri-State CCS Hub), courtesy of a grant from the Department of Energy. The federal 45Q carbon tax credit also will provide $85 per ton of carbon dioxide captured and permanently stored throughout the 30-year lifetime of the project. With plans to capture 5 million tons of CO2 per year, the costs of this project become quite high ($425 million per year), and taxpayers will be footing the bill. A typical coal-fired power plant emits approximately 15 million tons of CO2 per year, so this CCS hub will barely make a dent in the total amount of CO2 emitted in our region.

Concerns about the safety and effectiveness of CCS were echoed in a recent letter to the editor in The Weirton Daily Times by Hancock County Commissioner Tommy Ogden. His concerns included environmental and safety issues associated with the pipelines needed to transport pressurized carbon dioxide. He also is concerned that storing carbon dioxide underground might impact future attempts to access oil and gas resources.

Ogden’s fears are not unfounded, as peer-reviewed research shows that fracking and carbon dioxide storage in the same area are not compatible. “Shale gas production is in direct conflict with the use of shale formations as a caprock barrier to CO2 migration.” During fracking operations, the rock strata is fractured to allow methane gas to escape. Once this happens, there is no longer an “impenetrable cover to hold CO2 underground permanently and prevent it from leaking back into the atmosphere.” Additionally, Tenaska claims they can permanently store the CO2, but studies show only a small fraction of the gas reacts with brine to form a solid, which results in permanent storage. The rest of the CO2 remains in a more “tenuous form.”

There are increases in water usage at the front end of the capture process as well as possible contamination of ground water after injection. The current method for capturing carbon dioxide from industrial smokestacks requires using dangerous amine compounds and significant quantities of water. The final stage of the process, the injection into Class VI wells, also can negatively affect water resources.

This can occur through leakage of CO2 from the pore spaces or around the injection well annulus. The combination of water and carbon dioxide creates carbonic acid. This acidifies groundwater. In April, Illinois state senators voted unanimously, 55-0, to ban carbon sequestration near the Mahomet Aquifer, the sole source of water for nearly 1 million people in the region. A leak at Archer Daniels Midland’s carbon capture and sequestration facility for an ethanol plant near Decatur occurred in 2024 and threatened the drinking water of 14 counties.

The fact that Ohio has more than 36,000 orphan oil wells adds to the risks of injecting high pressure CO2 into Ohio’s Appalachian counties. These legacy wells provide paths of least residence for CO2 to leak out of storage sites. Washington County residents already have reason to believe that injected brine wastes into Class II wells is migrating into oil and gas production wells. They are worried injecting high pressure CO2 will only exacerbate the problem.

Even a small amount of seismic activity can trigger an earthquake, thus threatening the seal of a carbon storage site. CCS itself can trigger earthquakes. “Deep borehole stress measurements at the Mountaineer coal-burning power plant on the Ohio River in West Virginia indicate a severe limitation on the rate at which CO2 could be injected without the resulting pressure build-up initiating slip on preexisting faults,” according to a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

To date, the only focus of CCS in Ohio has been on the end stage of the process: Injection into Class VI wells. The other stages of CCS, including removing CO2 from industrial sources, compressing CO2 and transporting CO2 through pipelines, also present many risks to frontline communities. Currently, there are no facilities in Ohio that are capturing CO2, as well as no pipelines to transport it. So why the big hurry to sign CCS leases? There remain too many unanswered questions, and too many risks associated with a process that has no history in Ohio and no proof it can successfully make a dent in our carbon dioxide emissions.

(Pokladnik, a resident of Uhrichsville, is certified in hazardous materials regulations)