In Rural Illinois, Residents Protest a First-of-its-kind Agreement To Power Data Centers with Natural Gas + Carbon Capture and Sequestration

This story was produced with support from the Lumpkin Family Foundation. The Lumpkin Family Foundation supports people working together to build healthy, sustainable communities in East Central Illinois and across the U.S. Verlyn Rosenberger, 88, got involved with the progressive grassroots community organization Illinois People’s Action (IPA) 20 years ago. Over the decades, the retired schoolteacher’s causes have ranged from protesting predatory payday lending to regional oil pipelines. Recently, however, the focus of Rosenberger’s activism has been close to home: opposing expansion at the nation’s first commercial carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) plant in Decatur, Illinois. This technology, heralded as a climate solution, involves capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) from emissions streams and storing it deep underground. It has been established in Central Illinois over the past two decades, primarily at the Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) agriculture processing plant in Decatur. But in 2024, a series of leaks at the company’s CO2 monitoring wells – used to verify that the gas is being stored as expected underground – sparked widespread local concern. ADM’s failure to disclose these technology malfunctions bred distrust among residents like Rosenberger, and is now contributing to rising backlash against the company’s bids to expand operations. Amidst the growing demand to feed power-hungry data centers across the Midwest, ADM announced a partnership with Google and Broadwing Energy in October 2025 to bring a first-of-its-kind natural gas power plant with CCS technology to Decatur. The energy from the natural gas will deliver a one-two punch that both supplies the region’s grid with much-needed energy and, through the use of carbon capture, meets Google’s corporate sustainability goals to achieve net-zero emissions across its supply chain by 2030. Rosenberger and her neighbors in the IPA group are against ADM’s plans, as well as other sequestration projects that have cropped up throughout Illinois, where the geology is ideal for injecting and storing carbon deep in the earth. Rosenberger said she’s worried about ADM’s track record with transparency, and about the technology’s potential impacts on the community’s drinking water. “We just don’t want to be guinea pigs. We don’t want to be sacrificed. We want total transparency,” Rosenberger told us in April, when several IPA members gathered to meet with us at a church in Decatur. The group – all retired women save for the meeting’s organizer, Kayla McGhee, who is employed by IPA – greeted us upstairs in one of the church’s meeting rooms. Newspaper clipping, maps, and pamphlets from years of tracking ADM’s CCS operations lay scattered on top of a folding table where the women were seated. “The public didn’t know anything about what was happening at ADM until it came out in the newspaper,” Rosenberger said, showing us a paper clipping from when E&E News broke the news, in September 2024, that ADM’s carbon capture wells had been experiencing leaks. At the time, it was revealed that ADM’s CCS project had violated the Safe Drinking Water Act, six months after the first leak was detected. The second leak was detected that same month, in September 2024, when tests at ADM’s second monitoring well revealed unexpected fluid movement 5,000 feet below ground, indicating a possible malfunctioning well. All of the women who gathered in April to meet us in the Decatur church live within the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s federally-mandated Area of Review for ADM’s carbon sequestration project. The area encompasses land in and around Decatur where there are two existing sequestration wells and five new wells under consideration for permits. The new wells will more than quadruple the current rate of carbon sequestration in Decatur, injecting up to 2 million tons of CO2 per year underground as part of the partnership with Broadwing and Google. Since ADM announced plans to expand its CCS operations, Rosenberger and others at IPA have remained vocal opponents. The group is concerned about the expansion’s potential effects on Lake Decatur, the community’s primary source of drinking water. ADM’s carbon storage reservoir lies several thousand feet beneath the lake, and there are fears that unanticipated damage to the site – like the leaks that previously occurred with ADM’s monitoring wells – could cause the stored gas to bubble up to the surface and contaminate the drinking water. “This is not a good thing,” said Doris McKay from her seat opposite Rosenberger at the April IPA gathering. “This endangers our water and our air.” Under scrutiny from the EPA, ADM fixed the leaks in its wells and addressed their system’s engineering flaws in August 2025, after pausing its CO2 injections for nearly a year. A number of geologists specializing in CCS both in Illinois and across the country told us the industry has learned lessons from the incidents and said they did not see any current risk to Decatur’s drinking water. All of the geologists we spoke to expressed confidence in ADM’s plans to safely scale up CO2 injections. That has not convinced McKay and her neighbors, who continue protesting the plans. “I’ve lived in this area long enough to know that ADM doesn’t always follow through,” McKay said, echoing skepticism we heard from other activists about ADM’s trustworthiness after the company did not immediately disclose their leaking wells in 2024. What is Carbon Sequestration? Carbon capture and sequestration is a decarbonization method where CO2 is captured from the emissions streams of manufacturing or energy generation and stored deep in the earth, often more than a mile underground, for long periods of time. The goal is to keep CO2, a planet-warming greenhouse gas, from entering the atmosphere and contributing to climate change. Once captured, CO2 is pumped into an underground Class VI well, named for the Class VI EPA permit that’s required to build it. Central Illinois, where Decatur is located, is well-suited for carbon sequestration thanks to the Mt. Simon Sandstone, a geologic formation made up of porous rock. The layer is located just over a mile underground and has abundant pore space between its sand grains that can store CO2. The depth and storage capacity of the Mt. Simon Sandstone makes it highly suitable for a carbon reservoir, said Randy Locke, chief scientist of research and development at the Illinois State Geological Survey (ISGS). CO2 stored in the rock’s pore spaces will stay there, Locke said, because the sandstone is covered by a layer of caprock with low permeability called the Eau Claire Formation, which acts as a barrier between the CO2 reservoir and other layers of rock closer to the surface. The lack of fluid movement through the Eau Claire Formation in the Decatur area has been verified by water quality measurements collected by the ISGS. Beyond its geology, the region’s industry also makes it an attractive location for CCS. “One of the main reasons why Illinois is such a hot spot is just because of the proximity to all the ethanol production facilities,” said Anna Littlefield, a manager for the Low Carbon Energy Technologies program at the Payne Institute for Public Policy at Colorado School of Mines. “Proximity to emitters is a big driver for where these projects are being scouted and developed.” As a climate solution, Littlefield sees CCS as “the brute force option,” because it removes carbon from the atmosphere emitted by industrial processes that are otherwise hard to power with clean energy. “In my mind, CCS is really a strong pillar of climate solutions, because it deals with the volume of CO2 that we need to deal with, which is immense,” she said. Ethanol production and the combustion of natural gas at power plants are two fossil fuel sources where decarbonization is feasible and cost-effective, Littlefield said. And compared with other fossil fuels, like coal, natural gas is relatively straightforward to decarbonize. At the Broadwing natural gas plant, CO2 will be captured from natural gas emissions and then concentrated before being injected underground for long-term storage, said Nathan Webb, head of subsurface energy resources at the Illinois State Geological Survey. Removing CO2 from exhaust streams has been perfected by the oil and gas industry through a separate process called enhanced oil recovery. Now, natural gas-plus-CCS is promulgated as a climate solution that can help industrial energy users meet their corporate sustainability goals. First of its Kind While other gas-plus-CCS projects exist, Google’s partnership with ADM and Broadwing Energy, announced in October 2025, made waves in the energy industry. That’s because it’s a first for Big Tech: Google has already signed a power purchase agreement for the project, ensuring the electricity generated from the new Broadwing power plant has an end-user on the grid – Google’s data centers. Plus, the carbon sequestration will happen onsite, meaning no pipelines will be needed to move captured carbon to another location for injection. Google, which aims to operate entirely on clean energy sources by 2030, is using natural gas-plus-CCS to meet its goal. The company’s partnership with ADM and Broadwing represents its most significant commitment to the technology yet. The project comes as Google’s emissions and power use are soaring as a result of its AI buildout. Though Google has invested more in clean energy than many of its Big Tech competitors, the company’s 2026 environmental report revealed that its greenhouse gas emissions rose 18% since 2025, the largest annual increase the company has ever reported, driven mostly by AI-related manufacturing. Chrissy Moy, a Google spokesperson, did not respond to a question about why the company chose to invest in natural gas-plus-CCS specifically as part of their broader portfolio aimed at advancing clean energy. But there are financial incentives on the table. On its own, carbon sequestration is expensive: it costs around $20-30 more per megawatt hour to add CCS to natural gas electricity generation. But the federal 45Q tax credit helps to balance the math, offering $85 per metric ton of carbon sequestered. Broadwing, Google’s partner, will cash in on those tax incentives, worth roughly $170 million (assuming 2 million tons of CO2 sequestered) in taxpayer dollars. Broadwing is owned by Low Carbon Infrastructure, a Houston, Texas-based company, funded by venture capital investment from I Squared Capital. Local Resistance to Big Tech As data centers scale around the country, other Big Tech companies are embracing natural gas as one of the fastest forms of round-the-clock energy that can be deployed quickly to meet energy demands. Yet despite Google’s addition of CCS to natural gas power in Decatur, the community doesn’t want to be taken advantage of. “This is our community. It does not belong to ADM. It does not belong to… Google, Broadwing, or anybody. It’s our community,” Verlyn Rosenberger, an IPA group member, said. To get permits from Decatur’s city government to begin building the power plant, Broadwing proposed to fund 50% of a much-needed sewage lift station, an estimated investment of $12 million dollars. At a Decatur City Council meeting held on February 2, 2026, where council members voted on the Broadwing Energy development agreement, IPA member Doris McKay asked the City Council to pause their deliberations until they had considered all of the development’s potential risks. “I said, ‘you have an obligation, a sacred right to ask questions and do things’. But they were all so excited about the $12 million.” During an interview in April, David Horn, a Decatur city council member, told us he “attempted to table the vote so that these questions could be addressed,” but the vote went ahead anyways, passing 6-1. Horn ultimately voted for the project. In May 2026, the Illinois EPA hearing about the project in Decatur attracted more than 100 attendees, including IPA members, to make public comments about the proposed construction permit for Broadwing Energy. Broadwing Energy and Low Carbon Industries did not reply to multiple requests for comment. Before power generation with CCS can begin, the five Class VI permits need EPA approval. Draft permits for two of the wells are scheduled to become available for public comment at the end of November, with a final permit decision estimated for the spring of 2027. The other three wells don’t yet have an estimated timeline. ADM’s Activities ‘Raise Eyebrows’ David Horn doesn’t need to be convinced that climate change is real. Or that it’s bad. He calls it an “existential threat.” The Decatur City Council member is also a professor of biology at the city’s own Milliken University, where his specialities include ecology, conservation biology, and vertebrate biology. His office on the Milliken campus is adorned with vertebrates – mostly birds, some of which are suspended from the ceiling. During the near decade that Horn has been serving on the Decatur City Council, ADM has been sequestering carbon at its facility some six miles from Horn’s office. Horn regards the company as a pioneer and global leader in CCS. That’s why, in March 2023, Horn cast his vote along with the rest of the seven-member city council to allow the city manager to negotiate with ADM on the terms of the company’s CCS operations under Lake Decatur. “We need to do something to reduce fossil fuel emissions, and at the time of the vote, there was nothing [from] ADM’s activities prior to that vote that would have told me that there was any reason to be hesitant,” Horn said. “Now, if I were to fast-forward to March 2024, and to the fall of 2024, at that point in time, there have been some things that have happened that simply raise eyebrows.” After the March 2023 city council vote, the city manager negotiated an agreement with ADM that included compensation for the city, paid as a one-time fee of $1.21 million, in exchange for a 99-year easement to sequester CO2 under Lake Decatur. After approval from the city council in March 2024, the city manager signed the agreement in May 2024. By this time, ADM already knew one of their monitoring wells was malfunctioning but news had not yet broken to the city council or the public. “Why is it in March of 2024 that ADM had a leak in its monitoring well and did not notify the city of that leak at the same time that negotiations of that easement agreement were being made?” Horn said. “In my view, that is akin to selling somebody a used car and not telling somebody that there is a problem with it.” By the time the news was brought to light, Horn was frustrated by the lack of transparency. Additionally, he told us he regretted not asking for a higher fee. Leaks Were ‘Not a Geologic Failure’ Randy Locke at the Illinois State Geological Survey compared the monitoring wells – which are separate from the sequestration wells – to pipes with different valves at different depths underground. The valves are designed to help take measurements in the sandstone layer where the CO2 is stored. Yet when the wells leaked in March 2024 and then again in September of that year, it was as though the valves malfunctioned and didn’t close right, Locke said. This failure enabled a briny solution containing liquefied CO2 and salty water to move up from the deep sandstone layer to above the caprock layer. This is exactly what worries Rosenberger and the other members of the IPA, including employee Kayla McGhee. “What happens when they leak underneath Lake Decatur? That’s going to completely eradicate that water resource for the Decatur residents, said McGhee. The geologists we spoke with disagreed with this characterization. Locke said that the whole point of the application for Class VI permits is to protect groundwater. Additionally, he said, water used for drinking sits at 500 feet at the deepest, whereas the leaks occurred around 5,000 feet underground, 4,500 feet below any groundwater, according to ADM. “It was not a geologic failure by any means,” Anna Littlefield said of the leaks, saying that a malfunction occurred because ADM didn’t use corrosion-resistant steel. A spokesperson for ADM said in a statement that the monitoring well used “a corrosion-resistant 13 chrome steel commonly used in CO2 applications.” While this material has historically been used for oil and gas wells, the EPA told companies 13 chrome is not suitable for CO2 sequestration following the incident at ADM. After detecting a second leak and pausing its CO2 injections, ADM reconstructed its monitoring wells in 2025 using 25 chrome steel, a more corrosion-resistant material that’s significantly more expensive than its 13 chrome predecessor. ADM has also stated that it is now using separate wells to monitor different layers underground, rather than having multiple openings in one well. “EPA has guided them to a better well design,” Randy Locke said while describing ADM’s efforts to repair the monitoring wells and mitigate the potential for future leaks. By August 29, 2025, ADM had completed this redesign in compliance with an EPA enforcement order. The company was subsequently allowed to resume injections at its CCS facility. “We take very seriously our responsibility to design, construct, and operate this technology safely and make adjustments as needed,” an ADM spokesperson said in a statement. The Carbon Economic Engine Decatur residents aren’t the only ones alarmed by CCS proposals in their state. Neighbors in nearby Urbana, Illinois are also taking action. Pam Richart has tracked CCS projects across Illinois for nearly two decades. She and her husband, Lan, started the Eco-Justice Collaborative nonprofit in 2007 and realized soon after that the growing carbon sequestration industry posed a threat to their organization’s aims around justice-oriented climate solutions. The couple’s house in Champaign is filled with ephemera from their years of activism, from news articles to lawsuit documents. “We really need to stop and take a holistic view of what we’re doing, and we need to be restoring our ecosystems,” said Richart, who sees CCS as a way to continue using fossil fuels rather than a way to curb climate change. In 2022, the Richarts helped start the Coalition to Stop CO2 Pipelines to bring different groups together to organize against CCS in Central Illinois. To better communicate about the various projects proposed in the region, Pam Richart taught herself ArcGIS, a computer mapping program, and built an interactive map overlaying CCS well permit applications with features like geology, water resources, abandoned oil wells, and projected carbon storage plumes. Sitting in her living room in April 2026, Richart told us she sees CCS less as a climate solution than an economic engine that could be hurting the environment. She was quick to reference the federal tax credit, 45Q, that’s been in place since 2008 to incentivize industrial carbon capture and sequestration among CO2 emitters. In Richart’s view, CCS is “keeping fossil fuel plants running,” by allowing companies to build natural gas plants and then capture carbon emissions from them. “We have to transition from fossil fuels as quickly as we can,” she said. When asked about her preferred climate solutions, Richart said the “growth economy” – the phenomenon by which industries are always scaling – is part of the problem. She said that ecological restoration, biological sequestration, and regenerative agriculture are tenets of her ideal solution. Abandoned Wells Among Richart’s concerns about CCS are legacy oil and gas infrastructure. Illinois, and particularly Southeastern Illinois, is dotted with abandoned or improperly decommissioned wells leftover from 19th and 20th century oil and gas production. Often, Richart said, old wells are plugged with a kind of cement that can’t always withstand pressure from nearby CO2 plumes if the cement has not been properly injected. In 2021, the Environmental Defense Fund worked with McGill University to document 4,050 orphan wells in Illinois, and estimated that more than 150,000 oil, gas, and injection wells have been drilled in the state since 1853. Richart said the number of abandoned wells in Illinois alone could be much higher than the state’s most recent estimates, since its regulatory agencies are operating with incomplete data on the topic. Identifying abandoned wells is part of the Area of Review process, a required step for anyone looking to develop a CCS project, Locke and Webb said. If an applicant, like ADM, identifies a legacy well that’s deep enough to enter the sandstone or caprock layer, there are several actions the applicant must take to get a Class VI permit, Webb said. An applicant must identify the status of the well, plug the well or prove it’s been plugged, or otherwise monitor the well. “You have to ensure that over time, you’re not detecting pressure at the surface, you’re not seeing fluids come to the surface, all those sorts of things,” Webb said. Most oil and gas wells are not deep enough to trigger these kinds of corrective actions to begin with, Webb said, as the vast majority of legacy oil and gas infrastructure is several thousand feet shallower than the Mt. Simon Sandstone, where CO2 is stored. Littlefield said that the rigor of the Class VI permit often steers companies away from places with a high volume of legacy oil wells. “Companies tend to look for greenfield areas where there are very few well bores, because that is such a huge upfront cost to have to go in and mitigate all of those old oil and gas wells,” she said. Richart worries about the speed with which ADM is scaling their sequestration efforts, especially with a regulatory body that has experienced cuts from the Trump Administration. “[The] EPA has been drastically cut. Their funding has been cut, their staff has been cut,” said Richart. “All of these hazards and the risks are real, and we’re only talking about sequestration.” In his work at the Illinois State Geological Survey, Locke said he hasn’t experienced any changes in his interactions with EPA staff. “Everything’s the same, Class VI hasn’t changed at all,” he said. The People Continue To Fight Outside the church in Decatur in April, the women affiliated with Illinois People’s Action gathered in front of a limestone brick wall adorned with a pride flag that said, “God Welcomes All.” Before posing for a group photo, Verlyn Rosenberger stopped by her car, a 1990s-era Honda Civic, to grab a sign positioned in her rear window, functioning as a kind of homemade mobile billboard. She came back holding the sun-bleached poster, which read, “Do not trust ADM with Lake Decatur.” Rosenberger then rejoined the group. “We need to have a say in what’s happening here,” Rosenberger said. “It’s our health and safety that are at risk.”