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Partly cloudy with afternoon showers or thunderstorms. Storms may contain strong gusty winds. High 82F. Winds SSE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 50%..
Scattered thunderstorms this evening. A steady rain arriving overnight. Storms may contain strong gusty winds. Low 66F. Winds SSE at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 80%.
Darrel Steggall, Fairbank, asked at an informational meeting Tuesday if the proposed liquefied carbon dioxide pipeline project through southeast Fayette County was Navigator Heartland Greenway’s largest project undertaking since 2012. Steggall then asked about the private funding and thirdly what happens if the project goes awry and they pull out.
Tim O’Brien, Fayette, asked at a meeting Tuesday at The Coliseum in Oelwein if Navigator Heartland Greenway, the company proposing a liquefied carbon dioxide pipeline through Fayette County northeast of Fairbank, had engineered a solution to recapture the carbon if it came out of the sandstone, urged the company to cast a wide net in its promised responder training, and asked about a CO2 pipeline rupture in Satartia, Mississippi, in 2020.
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Darrel Steggall, Fairbank, asked at an informational meeting Tuesday if the proposed liquefied carbon dioxide pipeline project through southeast Fayette County was Navigator Heartland Greenway’s largest project undertaking since 2012. Steggall then asked about the private funding and thirdly what happens if the project goes awry and they pull out.
Tim O’Brien, Fayette, asked at a meeting Tuesday at The Coliseum in Oelwein if Navigator Heartland Greenway, the company proposing a liquefied carbon dioxide pipeline through Fayette County northeast of Fairbank, had engineered a solution to recapture the carbon if it came out of the sandstone, urged the company to cast a wide net in its promised responder training, and asked about a CO2 pipeline rupture in Satartia, Mississippi, in 2020.
An informational meeting about a proposed carbon dioxide pipeline which is planned to go through Fayette County northeast of Fairbank for the POET Bioprocessing plant to connect, drew a crowd to The Coliseum in Oelwein on Tuesday.
The Iowa Utilities Board conducted the informational meeting, a required process so negotiations for easements could begin. An IUB staffer said he counted just more than 70 attendees.
Josh Byrnes, a utilities board member, outlined the rights of landowners, and explained the responsibilities of the board.
The company proposing the pipeline, Navigator Heartland Greenway LLC, outlined the project. The current proposed route will cover 810 miles through Iowa ending in a saline sandstone formation over a mile deep in the Illinois Basin near Decatur.
Over an hour later, the board opened the microphone for audience members, with an emphasis on landowners, noting that spoken comments that night would not be filed with the utilities board.
Average time for the informational meetings has been over three hours, Byrnes said.
The company, Navigator, could not begin right-of-way easement negotiations with landowners until after Tuesday’s informational meeting and cannot petition the Utilities Board for a permit until at least 30 days after the final informational meeting, according to a packet from IUB.
Once the company petitions for a permit, Iowa law requires a public evidentiary hearing on the pipeline permit petition. After the petition is reviewed, notice will be published for two weeks in a newspaper in each affected county with the time, date and place of the evidentiary hearing.
“The hearing will be the opportunity for interested parties to present their evidence in favor of or opposing the project. IUB’s decision will be based on the record created at that hearing,” the packet states.
As the pipeline is more than 5 miles long, the hearing must occur in the county seat of the county at the midpoint of the proposed line, per Iowa Code 479B.6(2).
The midpoint is based on the trunk line and laterals of the pipe, Byrnes said.
Written comments or objections may be filed with IUB at any time but not later than five days before the hearing. An objection can be filed from efs.iowa.gov under the Navigator Heartland Greenway pipeline docket number, HLP-2021-0003.
Navigator Vice-President of Government and Public Affairs Elizabeth Burns-Thompson discussed the proposed project next.
Think of the CO2 transit system as a bus system that will take the liquefied compound from points A to B with Navigator as the bus company, she said.
The system, funded by private equity firm Black Rock, could handle 15 million metric tons of CO2 per year once built out, she said.
CO2 has a potential to be a co-product like anything else an ethanol plant produces, she said. Potential uses in the company’s footprint include beverage carbonation, bio-plastics or meat processing.
“Now we call them co-products,” Burns-Thompson said. “Sometimes those are just as profitable as a value stream coming off that plant as the ethanol itself.”
Other economic incentives for the pipeline include the 45Q tax credit, the ability to offset emissions, and the resulting potential to market ethanol as a low-carbon fuel in states that rank fuel by carbon intensity.
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 45Q tax credit is good for 12 years to help help cost-share capital-extensive investments, Burns-Thompson said.
An economic study showed that the project will create 5,000 construction jobs and 50 permanent jobs, per the presentation.
Canada also uses a carbon intensity score, Burns-Thompson said, noting, “We think that marketplace will grow internationally.”
For the CO2 that cannot be sold as a co-product, Navigator intends to build injection wells and pump the remainder into a saline sandstone reservoir a mile below the Illinois Basin near Decatur, using a class six deep injection permit from the Environmental Protection Agency. A cap rock right above the sandstone will allow this formation to keep the CO2 in place until it binds with the sandstone over time.
A CO2 sequestration model project is the topic of a museum near Decatur, Burns-Thompson said.
Currently 5,000 miles of CO2 transport infrastructure crisscross the US, she said, citing the Pipeline Hazardous Material Safety Administration of the Department of Transportation. That’s out of over 229,000 miles of total pipeline, which also includes crude oil, refined petroleum, “highly volatile liquids” and fuel grade ethanol, per PHMSA.
The 6- to 20-inch outside-diameter pipe will be buried 5 feet deep with red hazardous pipeline warning tape two feet above it. It will normally operate at 1300-2100 psi and 40-80 degrees F.
Design will include plume dispersion modeling studies and safety testing required by the PHMSA Office of Pipeline Safety. She told the Daily Register in an earlier interview the pipe must be stress-tested at 1.25 times the 2200 psi max operating pressure, 2750 psi, and maintain that for eight hours.
Navigator will engage emergency medical services and responders by inventorying the tools and trainings they need in order to assist.
Compensation fits into three general “buckets,” which a land agent will negotiate with owners, easements, crop loss and damages to existing infrastructure.
Darrel Steggall, Fairbank asked if this project was Navigator Heartland Greenway’s largest project undertaking since 2012. Steggall then asked about the private funding and thirdly what happens if the project goes awry and they pull out.
Navigator’s Jordan Jones, director of business development, said the Navigator family of assets has put over 1,300 miles of new-built pipeline, primarily in service of crude oil in west Texas and Oklahoma.
“We are funded by Black Rock, it is a partnership between Black Rock and the Navigator management team,” Jones said.
“That is a stipulation as part of our permit, there’s a requirement that we’re bonded,” Burns-Thompson said.
Tim O’Brien, Fayette, asked if the company had engineered a solution to recapture the carbon if it came out of the sandstone.
“Sequestering it, has a cap rock over it and is heavily monitored so it doesn’t come out,” Howard said.
“Today’s problems were yesterday’s solutions,” O’Brien said.
“The easements, the contracts we have with the landowners say it is for one pipe, one commodity, and that is CO2,” Burns-Thompson said. “Our permit application, we have exclusivity for one pipe and one commodity. Should that ever change, that would require entirely new easements across the entire project footprint as well as entirely new permits.”
“True but you also noted new things happen, new technology, new business conditions,” O’Brien said. “That is a potential because your 45Q tax abatement is good for about 12 years.”
“Correct, the stipulations on that federal tax program means that our shippers, so the ethanol plants and fertilizer facilities, do have the eligibility for them to receive that tax credit for 12 years,” Burns-Thompson said.
O’Brien mentioned a pipeline rupture in Satartia, Mississippi. He said he was on his town’s ambulance crew and said in case of an event that could potentially sicken many, dispatch would page mutual aid groups who “could be miles away. Your net for training for a CO2 incident needs to be quite broad.”
Navigator’s Chris Brown, vice-president of capital projects with engineering credentials, explained the Satartia incident for the audience.
In 2020 a CO2 pipeline operator in Satartia, Mississippi, had a rupture in a 24-inch diameter pipeline next to a highway. CO2 released from the pipeline migrated down to the city of Satartia and sent 49 people to the hospital, with some 290 in the area evacuated, including the town. That pipeline was doing enhanced oil recovery, EOR, so the CO2 also contained hydrogen sulfide, he said.
“It was not a pure 98% CO2 product as what we would be transporting,” Brown said. “However the point is still there, CO2 was still released and individuals in Satartia fell ill.
“PHMSA, who we’re regulated by, specifically Part 195 (the presentation references this in the 49 Code of Federal Regulations), when something like that happens on a pipeline system, they’ll do an extensive investigation. They issued their report in May of this year.”
PHMSA found a long period of heavy rain caused a mudslide and the pipeline ruptured.
PHMSA found that operator did not uphold the requirements as a prudent operator, in three different areas, Brown said.
First, they did not perform an effective geohazard analysis that could have detected that the area of the rupture was susceptible to erosion.
Second, they underestimated the areas that could be impacted by a release of CO2 to the environment.
“That operator did not perform the plume studies like we’re doing right now. The estimating impact is directly tied to the plume studies,” Brown said. “Overlaying those plume analysis over your high consequence areas analysis as well.”
Third, PHMSA found the operator did not engage with the county or city’s emergency management services.
“The city of Satartia was not aware there was a CO2 pipeline adjacent to their area,” he said.
“I’m going to go in reverse order now. As an operator, when PHMSA issues a bulletin like that, it’s every operator’s duty and responsibility to review that, … how do you implement that into your own lessons learned?
“Where we’re at in our phase of the project, we’re in the design phase. We utilized all three issues they found in there while we were developing this project. We are engaging with the county’s emergency management services, in fact we were in Fayette County on June 29 of this year as introductory meeting to explain our desire to have these 1:1 discussions with the emergency management services. We are coming back in the first quarter of 2023 to every county that we traverse through and even asking counties that are adjacent that are involved in mutual aid agreements — you alluded to that — and asking them to participate as well. In the meantime, we’re developing our emergency response plans — will issue those to the counties, asking them to review, comment, add to them, tell them if we’ve got something that doesn’t apply or if we’re missing something — and really work together to develop these final plans.
“When we’re in these meetings, it’s our intent to again, identify the gaps in what the county needs to even be able to respond to a CO2 incident. Once we identify the gaps, whether it be equipment, educational materials, personnel, whatever it is, we will work with the counties to mitigate those gaps. That’s the first step.
“The second thing is, we are receiving our bids this week for our geohazard survey.
“We will perform a geohazard survey on all 1,302 miles of the pipeline system. That will take into account seismic, karst, abandoned mines, even areas susceptible to erosion like what happened down in Satartia there.
“Finally the plume studies, Elizabeth did mention it in the presentation. We have two independent companies, DNV (Det Norske Veritas, he confirmed to O’Brien later) and Integrity Solutions, and we are analyzing every diameter, every pressure, and every wind type of situation, for a potential release of CO2 throughout the system. We’ll take those results and overlay them on our high consequence area maps. That takes into account proximity to residences, proximity to a gathering place, a church, nursing home, things of that nature. Environmentally sensitive areas. All these are layers in what we call the HCA platform. We combine the plume studies over the HCA layers and that identifies areas that are potentially higher risk than other areas.
“Once we identify those areas of high risks, we work to mitigate those high risks through some of those areas Elizabeth mentioned, a stronger pipe, heavier wall pipe, a deeper pipe. Put the pipe in, utilizing horizontal directional drill method versus conventional overcut, or even installing additional isolation pads.”
Questions continued on for some time. A partial list of audience members who addressed the company were Gary Shawver, Wadena; Jeff Milks, Oelwein; William Lambright, Fairbank; Jared Kane, Fairbank; Jerry Heineman, Fairbank; Janice Martins, Fairbank; Rustie Kane, Oelwein; and Sue Runyon, Fayette.
Partly cloudy with afternoon showers or thunderstorms. Storms may contain strong gusty winds. High 82F. Winds SSE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 50%.
Scattered thunderstorms this evening. A steady rain arriving overnight. Storms may contain strong gusty winds. Low 66F. Winds SSE at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 80%.
Thunderstorms in the morning, then skies turning partly cloudy late. High 83F. Winds S at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 60%.
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