452: Ethanol executive says carbon capture is a must

Thanks to the widely-reported consternation over carbon pipelines, carbon capture has become a hot-button issue. But political kerfuffles tend to obscure that North Dakota is on the bleeding edge of carbon capture and storage technology.

On this episode of Plain Talk, Jeff Zueger, the CEO of Harvestone, joined us to talk about the new carbon capture and storage project they've launched at their Blue Flint Ethanol facility near Underwood. At that facility, they're capturing 100% of their emissions from the fermentation process, and since October, they've been injecting 600 metric tons of CO2 about a mile-deep underground daily.

As significant as that is, the project's provenance may be even more critical. North Dakota was the first state in the nation to be granted primacy over carbon injection wells by the federal government. Blue Flint Ethanol is now the second project launched in North Dakota under that primacy through a process that, per Zueger, took just months as opposed to the years you might expect from federal regulators.

Zueger said capturing carbon is of huge important to the ethanol industry, from the farmers who grow fuel crops to companies like his that turn them into fuels. Carbon capture is "one of the single biggest things we can do to step down our carbon intensity," and that matters, because increasingly the fuels market is demanding lower carbon intensities.

Zueger pointed out that, thanks to the emergence of electric vehicles, the liquid fuels markets are already contracting, and the demand that's left wants lower-emission fuels.

"We have to respond to those markets," he said.