A Midwest pipeline promises to return carbon dioxide to the ground
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Image: Grist / Paul A. Souders / Getty Images. Article by
Grist –Most pipelines that snake around the United States carry carbon that was buried underground for millions of years and then dug up, destined to be burned in a combustion engine or furnace or boiler and emitted into the atmosphere. But a new pipeline that could soon wind through Iowa, Minnesota, and the Dakotas promises to do the opposite.
Summit Carbon Solutions, a spinoff of an Iowa-based agricultural company, recently announced it is developing a $2 billion pipeline project that will carry carbon dioxide captured from ethanol refineries scattered across the Midwest to a site in North Dakota where it will be pumped thousands of feet underground. The CO2 will start in the atmosphere, where it is heating up the planet, and get sucked down to earth by stalks of corn. While some of it will be turned into ethanol and blended into gasoline, the rest will be returned to the earth’s crust and — if all goes according to plan — buried forever. […]