Wabash Valley Resources: Carbon Storage Permits Are a Key Milestone for Ammonia Fertilizer Production
On Friday, July 7, 2023, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced its intent to issue two carbon storage injection well permits for a world-scale ammonia fertilizer production facility in Indiana.
“The carbon storage permits are an important milestone that brings the United States closer to industrial-scale, domestic, environmentally friendly ammonia production and moves America’s farmers closer to fertilizer independence,” said Greg Zoeller, Wabash Valley Resources‘ vice president of external affairs.
Zoeller added, “The EPA’s issuance of the two draft Class VI permits for carbon storage validates our investment to date and our more than five years of research and testing to verify the geology of the injection well sites as suitable for permanent carbon sequestration.”
The WVR facility will be Indiana’s only ammonia fertilizer plant, producing 500,000 metric tons (MT) of anhydrous ammonia annually. This equals a significant portion of the current annual usage within the Eastern Corn Belt. Using low-carbon ammonia increases the value of corn and ethanol in clean fuel jurisdictions (e.g., California) and increases market access internationally (e.g., Japan). The region’s current supply of ammonia has a high-carbon intensity, which may reduce the competitiveness of corn growers using such ammonia.
In 2019, the Indiana General Assembly identified WVR as Indiana’s pilot project for commercial demonstration of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology. WVR will liquefy, inject, and permanently store CO2 in subsurface rock formations at depths of nearly a mile (between 4,000 and 5,000 feet).
With an investment of $1 billion, the project will create hundreds of union construction jobs and high-paying permanent jobs.
“We thank the U.S. Department of Energy and the Indiana General Assembly for their support and vision. This is great news for the people of the Wabash Valley, the agricultural community, and the state of Indiana,” Zoeller concluded.
Wabash Valley Resources LLC was established in 2016 to acquire the SG Solutions gasification plant in West Terre Haute, Indiana. The strategy is to convert the site to a state-of-the-art anhydrous ammonia production facility using industrial-scale carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology. This conversion project is strategically significant as Indiana has a high demand for a reliable supply of agricultural ammonia, and the region boasts ideal geology for industrial-scale carbon sequestration. The project has received funding from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management to advance, develop, and validate technologies that enable safe, cost-effective, and permanent geologic storage of carbon dioxide.
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