A massive southeast Montana carbon sequestration project, 14 years in the making, is under environmental review by the Bureau of Land Management.
Exxon Mobil’s Shute Creek gas processing plant in southwest Wyoming captures carbon dioxide for sale to other companies for enhanced oil recovery. Research into carbon capture was recently criticized by some environmental groups, even as industry seeks ways to make coal viable despite market and climate change pressures.
ExxonMobil’s “Snowy River Carbon Dioxide Sequestration Project” would span 110,000 subsurface acres between Ekalaka and the Montana-Wyoming border. There, over 20 years, the company would pump an estimated 150 million tons of carbon dioxide from unidentified sources into a rock formation more than a mile beneath the surface.
The project has raised concerns about well water contamination and wildlife endangerment, as well as risks to local livestock operations and the possible leakage of carbon dioxide resulting from earthquakes.
Nearly all …