Construction has begun on the US’s first large-scale industrial facility for capturing and storing carbon dioxide.

Being built in Decatur, Illinois, the project is being built with the support of federal stimulus funds from the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). The facility is designed to capture and store one million tons of carbon dioxide a year. The carbon dioxide will be coming from a nearby Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) biofuels plant that processes corn into fuel-grade ethanol.

Because all the carbon dioxide will be produced from biologic fermentation, the CCS (carbon capture and storage) plant will actually have a negative carbon footprint, according to the US Department of Energy (DOE). That means the overall impact will be a net reduction of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

The CCS facility is expected to store about 2,500 metric tons of carbon dioxide a day in the saline Mount Simon Sandstone formation, around 7,000 feet underground. Experts say the formation has the potential to sequester all of the 250 million-plus tons of carbon dioxide produced each year by regional industry.

Operations at the plant are scheduled to start in the late summer of 2013.

In addition to ADM, other members of the DOE project team include Schlumberger Carbon Services, the Illinois State Geological Survey and Richland Community College. They were chosen by the DOE in a first-phase selection in October 2009, then picked in June 2010 as one of three projects to receive continued phase-two funding.

The project, which received $141 million in Recovery Act funding and another $66.5 million private sector cost-sharing, is being managed by the DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory.

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