The Strole family has operated this farm for around 200 years. Susan Strole-Kos is the latest to inhabit the old farmhouse.
“I made a promise to my dad,” she said. “And yeah, I intend on keeping that promise and handing it down to my daughter.”
But the risks of nearby carbon sequestration — the injection of carbon dioxide far underground — has them worried.
The landscape of Vermillion County bears the scars of previous energy projects. The adjacent topsoil is depleted from years of coal mining. The Strole family raised dairy cows until stray voltage from the local power company stopped them from producing milk.
Now, the nearby Duke Energy coal gasification plant has new owners.
“It was called Quasar Syngas. There was another name called Quasar Fertilizer. Then you had Wabash Valley Resources, and now I'm getting a letter from the EPA that said Wabash Carbon Services,” Strole-Kos said. “It took me a while to figure out all those companies are the same company.”
Wabash Valley Resources is building a $2.6 billion ammonia fertilizer plant. The company declined to be interviewed for this story, but spokesperson Pete Rimsans said in an email it will produce 500,000 metric tons of fertilizer per year.
With 70 percent of U.S. farmers saying they can’t pay for the fertilizer they need, demand is high for an affordable domestic source.
In 2022, Wabash Valley Resources gave Strole-Kos a phone call. They told her they were hosting a meeting with farmers to talk about fertilizer.
“I was interested,” she said. “Thought that might be a good thing, because we just went through the pandemic and the lockdown and everything and our fertilizer prices were tremendous.”
When she arrived, there were no farmers, just men from the company and a map of the surrounding land. They asked to survey her farm.
“They wanted me to sign a piece of paper for a few hundred dollars, and I told them, out in this community, we don't work that way. We do things on a handshake,” Strole-Kos said. “I was upset, and I was mad, all the emotions just came.”
To offset the massive carbon byproduct of ammonia fertilizer manufacturing, Wabash Valley Resources plans to capture 1.67 million tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere per year and pump it 4,000 feet underground.
The two injection sites are on either side of the Strole farm, in Vigo and Vermillion counties. It’s a process known as carbon capture and sequestration, or CCS.
Carbon sequestration is profitable thanks to a Bush-era tax credit, giving companies $85 per ton of the greenhouse gas captured. Some climate scientists believe carbon removal is necessary to stem climate change.
Nathan Moodie, a research assistant professor at the University of Utah, explained that while injecting carbon underground to extract oil has been common since the early 1970s, permanent storage has only been in practice for a few decades.
“The U.S. has only a handful of ongoing projects or demonstration projects that have happened, and most of those have been successful,” he said. Many more are in development.
Moodie said the Wabash Valley area has ideal conditions for carbon capture, with several hundred feet of porous Potosi dolomite sitting under a deep cap of dense, low-permeability limestone.
“That's like very, very, very, very high porosity and permeability in that dolomite, which makes an excellent reservoir to inject into,” Moodie said.
But injection projects do come with risk. Pressure buildup can lead to seismic activity, and carbon moving upward through cracks acidifies water on contact, dissolving rock that may contain heavy metals such as arsenic.
Two years ago, a facility in Decatur, Ill., leaked around 8,000 metric tons of liquid carbon dioxide out of its authorized injection area. Still, the leaked material was trapped several thousand feet below groundwater sources, and the affected well was plugged.
Hazards also are associated with the transport of carbon dioxide through pipelines. A 2021 rupture of a pipeline used for oil recovery in Satartia, Miss., hospitalized 49 residents.
Strole-Kos and her neighbors have been researching the practice, because they believe Wabash Valley Resources has not been transparent about the risks.
“We know about injections, we know about pressure fronts, we know about how it can induce earthquakes. We know that if it does migrate, it could migrate into our fresh water,” she said. “We know the questions that we can ask, but now the company is not talking.”
Asked about specific concerns, Wabash Valley Resources referred to a document responding to comments filed with the EPA.
WTIU spoke with several independent geologists about the project proposal. They agreed the proposed safety precautions appear to be proper but said they can’t be certain until Wabash Valley Resources gets core samples from the two injection sites.
Brian McPherson, a Utah professor, said pressure front modeling and seismic data reduce uncertainty, but the project will need samples of that dolomite.
“The amount of core, the depth of core, whether the core was sampled in the exact same area where injection will be carried out or if it was 30 miles away, that does make a big difference,” he said.
“Obviously the people that live above this have the right to be concerned and to get answers,” Moodie said. “But from looking at what is presented in the permits and in the responses and this data that you provided to me, if I personally lived above it, I wouldn’t have a concern of any type of leakage.”
The Class VI permit allows Wabash Valley Resources to start drilling, but before injection starts, it will need to collect baseline readings, and if the monitoring well detects high pressure during injection, it’s supposed to stop.
“Frankly, I think the EPA regulations – and it's a good thing – are overkill, and it should be overkill,” McPherson said.
But it’s not just the risks that bother the neighbors; it’s the way the project is being handled.
Former Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller joined the company as vice president of external affairs. He told Vermillion County Commissioners the company would sue if they passed an ordinance against carbon sequestration.
“We would be required to challenge the UDO in the event that you try to regulate federal and state authorities,” he said at a November meeting. “I know it sounds like a threat, but it's actually a notice.”
The commissioners pushed ahead, but a 2023 state law gave regulatory authority over CCS to the DNR, meaning its rules can’t be overruled by local government. The county sought a declaratory judgment, the State of Indiana filed as an intervener in the case and eventually the commissioners eventually dropped their effort.
Indiana is also seeking enforcement authority for Class VI injection wells from the federal government; that would be administered by the state’s natural resources commission. Normally, the EPA oversees such projects, but states can obtain primacy if they prove they have the capacity.
Some of the people who would be responsible for enforcement were involved in launching the Vigo and Vermillion CCS project.
Secretary of the Natural Resources Commission and current head of DNR is Alan Morrison, a former state representative who sponsored legislation in 2023 allowing Wabash Valley Resources to inject CO2 deep under private property in exchange for paying 40 percent of the rental value of the land. Morrison received a $5,000 campaign contribution from the company in 2020. One of the bill’s co-authors, former state Sen. Jon Ford, now heads the Indiana Office of Energy Development, which provides guidance and administers grants related to energy projects such as carbon capture. His campaigns received $25,000 from Wabash Valley Resources between 2020 and 2022 and $10,000 from Quasar Syngas in 2018.
DNR spokesperson Holly Lawson said in an email that the DNR developed its rules “with input from industry representatives, landowners, other state agencies, and additional stakeholders.”
“By accepting primacy for Class VI permitting, Indiana will be best positioned to work with all stakeholders to ensure that applications are reviewed with speed and efficiency,” she said.
Office of Energy Development spokesperson Greg Cook said that while the OED provides guidance to state and local governments on energy issues, it “did not assist with this specific project.”
The project and the pushback against it have been ongoing for years, but the company has yet to break ground.
Wabash Valley Resources has not indicated when it plans to begin constructing wells and pipelines. Rimsans wrote that the company “will provide updates as significant project milestones are reached.”
Once the project ends, the company will be responsible for monitoring those wells for the next ten years. The default for the EPA is 50 but can be reduced if surveys show there aren’t any conductive pathways for CO2.
Strole-Kos worries how long that carbon will hold and who will be on the hook if something goes wrong more than a decade down the line.
“It seems like every generation struggled to keep the farm and here I am,” Strole-Kos said. “I feel like we're struggling to keep it now.”
Despite favorable state legislation, considerable outside investment and EPA listening sessions, Moodie offers cautionary comment.
“What I've learned from doing this for many years is that if the public that lives in your project area doesn't buy into your project, you're going to be sunk,” Moodie said.
