Opponents said they feared an impact on property values and potential seismic activity from injecting the carbon dioxide underground, among other concerns.
“I think it’s fantastic,” Anne Vehre, an organizer of a citizens group that opposed the project, said Thursday, Aug. 20. “I was absolutely stunned (by the decision to abandon the project). We all were.”
The project would have injected carbon dioxide from a nearby ethanol plant more than 3,000 feet underground.
Most of the project’s funding, $61 million, would have come from the federal government. The Midwest Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership, managed by Battelle in Columbus, would have contributed $32 million, including $3 million in state funding.
Battelle spokesman T.R. Massey declined to elaborate on the business decisions that Battelle cited in saying it was no longer pursuing the project, saying only, “Economics mean a lot.”
The Andersons Marathon Ethanol LLC, Ohio’s largest ethanol plant, generates annually more than 250,000 tons of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas thought to contribute to climate change. Virtually all of it would have been injected underground if a porous rock layer filled with saltwater far beneath the ethanol plant had been deemed suitable.
The project hadn’t been far enough along for the ethanol plant’s owners to decide whether to allow it on their property, said Neill McKinstray, vice president and general manager of The Andersons’ ethanol division.
But to date, McKinstray said he hadn’t been assured to his satisfaction that any environmental contingencies, however remote, would be addressed.
McKinstray said he was disappointed that some local citizens seemed to feel ethanol plant officials didn’t have the community’s best interests at heart. He’s concerned the area might get an activist reputation that could discourage future business investment.
“We didn’t come to Greenville in order to be a bad corporate citizen,” he said. “What is concerning to me is that the community so quickly assumed otherwise.”
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-7457 or bsutherly@DaytonDailyNews.com.
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