Navigator’s Proposed Carbon Pipeline Struggles to Gain Support in Illinois

McDonough County residents are asking officials to stand their ground as Navigator offers payments totaling up to $18.9 million to the county in exchange for its support.

A farming county in Western Illinois doesn’t usually get many attendees at its board meetings. However, audiences—and their complaints—have grown over the last few months since Texas-based Navigator CO2 Ventures proposed running part of a 1,300-mile carbon dioxide pipeline through a chunk of farmland and residential areas. 

“I feel very violated,” said Cheryl Allison, 67, a farmer in McDonough County. “It shouldn’t be here.”

The system would run beneath three of Allison’s farms, where her family grows soybeans and corn, the top crops in Illinois. The pipeline would also run within a mile of her son’s and daughter’s homes. She worries that failures in the pipeline, Heartland Greenway, could put her family’s health at risk and permanently damage their farmland. 

Many other farmers in the state felt the same. McDonough and four other counties in Illinois issued two-year moratoriums last year on the construction of carbon pipelines, claiming that existing regulations for such projects don’t adequately prevent the pipelines from failing.

PHOTO: The POET Bioprocessing, a processing plant that produces ethanol in Menlo, Iowa on April 12, 2022. Navigator partnered with ethanol plants across the Midwest to collect, transport and store 15 million metric tons of carbon dioxide through a proposed carbon pipeline project. Credit: Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images