Is Green Methanol An Alternative To CO2 Pipelines?

By Erin Jordan

Especially not since he learned about CapCO2, a company marketing a system to capture CO2 from ethanol plants, combine it with hydrogen and turn it into green methanol — a highly sought renewable fuel.

“It’s just so much more of a logical, better-for-the-environment, not-destroying-Iowa-farmland concept,” said Reints, a Shell Rock farmer, real estate developer and pipeline opponent.

Real Carbon Tech, a Polish firm that developed the technology being used by CapCO2 in the United States, built the system in shipping containers that can be set up outside ethanol plants. As an ethanol plant emits CO2, the gas is captured, compressed and processed with hydrogen.

The end product is methanol, a fuel being used in some industries to replace diesel.

Danish shipping giant Maersk announced in November it needs 6 million tons of green methanol a year to reach its 2030 greenhouse gas emissions target and even more by 2040 to get to net zero emissions.

CapCO2 would ship the methanol out by rail — the same way ethanol already is transported from the plants, CapCO2 CEO Jeff Bonar told The Gazette.

“You’ve got this very pure, large amount of CO2 coming from an ethanol plant,” Bonar said. “For certain kinds of products, like methanol, that pure CO2 is perfect.”

Bonar drove through Iowa and Illinois earlier this month to meet with ethanol plant owners, farmers and other stakeholders to promote his product as an alternative to CO2 pipelines — contentious in Iowa because two of the projects want to use eminent domain to gain access to privately held land to build the underground pipelines.

Pipeline debate

The Iowa House on Wednesday passed a bill that would require pipeline companies to secure 90 percent of the land through voluntary leases on land before eminent domain could be used to gain access to the rest.

House File 565 now goes to the Iowa Senate, where its fate is uncertain.

Many farmers don’t want to be forced to provide easements to the pipeline companies — even though they’ll be paid for allowing access — and worry about lower yields and disrupted water drainage tiles where the pipelines are built.

Some farmers also don’t like hearing the Iowa Renewable Fuels Association say pipelines are the only way to preserve Iowa’s ethanol industry.

Reints, who sells the bulk of his corn to POET Bioprocessing in Shell Rock, criticized a recent study the association commissioned saying 75 percent of Iowa’s ethanol plants would go out of business without pipeline approval.

“The whole study was bought and paid for by them. What do you think the outcome is going to be?” he said. “It’s really embarrassing the stance that (Association Executive Director) Monte Shaw and others in the renewables industry are taking on this. It’s quite obvious their pockets are being lined.”

Shaw said the whole ethanol industry will benefit financially if plants can lower their greenhouse gas emissions enough to qualify for new tax credits authorized by the Inflation Reduction Act.