1 million metric tons of co2 captured and sequestered at Dakota Gas

Basin Electric continues to be an industry leader on carbon capture utilization and storage solutions. The Great Plains Synfuels Plant, a subsidiary of Dakota Gasification Company, located five miles northwest of Beulah, North Dakota, recently became home to the largest geologic sequestration project in the world.

The Great Plains CO₂ Sequestration Project went into service in mid-February 2024, and it’s expected the facility will capture up to 2.25 million metric tons of CO₂ per year. In August, the project hit a new milestone: 1-million-metric-tons of total injection since the project began.

“During the inception of the project, we were told that this would be the largest geologic sequestration project from a coal facility. Achieving the 1-million-ton milestone demonstrates that the project is living up to that claim,” Dale Johnson, senior vice president and plant manager at Dakota Gas, says. “Dakota Gas, Basin Electric, and our stakeholders can clearly see that the project is outperforming the expectations that we had at the onset of the project.”

Dakota Gas captures and sequesters CO₂ via a permanent geologic storage reservoir adjacent to the facility, the Broom Creek sandstone formation. Broom Creek has been deemed an ideal storage candidate because of its superior reservoir quality, depth, impermeable upper and lower confining zones, and expansive areal extent. Preliminary estimates suggest a maximum Broom Creek storage capacity exceeding 10 billion metric tons of CO₂.

The project is operating safely, and each individual well is performing better than the original modeling, which provides a favorable outlook for long-term economic return on investment.

“It’s also good for the energy industry to see how well this performs as carbon capture potentially plays a bigger role in the future,” Johnson says.