A Local and Global Challenge

America’s electrical grid is in trouble. Power plants that provide electricity continuously—day and night, whenever needed—are closing faster than they are being replaced.[1] Continued reduction of such “baseload” capacity would harm the economy, lower standards of living, and threaten public health.^[2]

Of course, Americans also face another crisis: the threat of global climate change, which is greatly exacerbated by greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) from the coal-fueled power plants that make up most of our grid: including here in Minnesota and its neighboring states. As the United States and nearly 200 other countries agreed in the Paris Agreement of 2015, nations must work together to keep the increase in global average temperature at or below 1.5°C—or else risk even greater public health risks, not to mention greater strain on power grid capacities.^[3]

Thus Minnesotans, like the rest of the world, face a conundrum. As is widely acknowledged by scientists, the world’s ambitious climate-safety goals cannot be achieved without widespread deployment of new technology to reduce and, ultimately, eliminate human-produced GHGs.[4] Yet as the United Nations Assembly asserted in 2023, the necessary “energy transition” away from fossil fuels must occur “in a just, orderly, and equitable manner.”^[5]. Immediately closing coal plants simply because they are coal plants would be unjust to the local economies depending on them, disruptive to an already strained electric grid, and inequitable to already marginalized communities already struggling to access affordable, reliable electricity.

So what is to be done? More specifically, what can be done here in Minnesota to protect the communities who depend on coal-fired plants, the consumers who rightfully expect electricity when they need it, and above all the climate—the health of which is critical to the future health of all of us?

An Answer: Project Tundra

One promising answer is Project Tundra: an effort to deploy a technology called “carbon capture and storage” (CCS) to reduce the carbon footprint of the coal-fired Milton R. Young (MRY) station near Center, North Dakota. Minnkota Power Cooperative, one of the project leaders, operates MRY and delivers its energy production to eleven power distribution cooperatives across northern Minnesota and North Dakota. Together, Minnkota and its members provide not-for-profit electricity to 150,000 consumers including schools, farms, and small businesses.[6]

Over the last three years, a bipartisan group of policymakers in Congress has provided critical incentives for CCS, which in simplest terms is a way to capture GHGs and store them deep underground rather releasing them into the atmosphere. This technology will allow states, communities, and operators to keep enough coal-fired power plants operating to meet baseload demand, while significantly reducing their GHGs and other pollutants, such as sulfur dioxides and particulate matter (soot).^[7][8]

In short, CCS can help meet our energy and climate challenges: but only if brought to commercially viable scale. Thus Project Tundra: a collaboration to take the next step forward with CCS technology.

Over the past twenty years, $425 million was invested in MRY to install emission-control technologies in its 705-megawatt plant.^[9] The goal of Project Tundra is to build on this legacy, and on a grand scale. Using CCS technology, Project Tundra would capture 4 million metric tons of MRY’s annual emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2): a GHG-reduction equivalent to taking over 800,000 cars off the road every year.^[10] The captured CO2 would then be safely and permanently stored in deep geologic formations approximately a mile underground. It would reduce the Young Station’s carbon footprint by nearly 75%

Project Tundra represents a major scale-up of existing CCS technology that will not only reduce GHGs immediately but will serve as a model for other CCS initiatives. In this way, it could catalyze exactly the type of sector-wide investment in a “flexible power system” that the non-partisan, independent International Energy Agency considers essential to meeting climate goals without disrupting the nation’s business, health, and transportation systems.^[11] Why? Because CCS, along with related CCUS (carbon capture, utilization, and storage) technologies, offers a means for citizens and policymakers to negotiate, on a regional level, a delicate and highly variable balance: the balance between an energy transition that moves too fast, disrupting and even endangering lives, and one that moves too slow, inviting climate disaster for all.[12]

Indeed, Project Tundra could open opportunities to deploy CCS not only in the United States but globally as well. Success here could translate into an overseas export market for the technology, especially to other fossil fuel-intensive economies such as China, the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter.^[13] This would enable coal plants around the world to be constructed or modified with CCS to help achieve the most ambitious targets of the Paris Agreement, and to do so thanks to innovators here in the Northland.^[14]

Who’s Behind It?

The importance of CCS to meeting the nation’s reliability and sustainability goals has been recognized by experts and policymakers on the left and right. In the words of Jim Matheson, CEO of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association and former Democratic member of Congress, “The importance of keeping the lights on transcends party lines.”  Reliable, sustainable electricity is an issue that “impacts all Americans – and is one that lawmakers in both parties must work seriously to address.” 

As noted, lawmakers have risen to the challenge. The introduction of the “CCUS^[15] Tax Credit Amendments Act of 2021” helped ensure the inclusion of federal grants and an essential federal tax credit for CCUS in both the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.  The original CCUS bill was cosponsored by 5 Republicans and 5 Democrats in the U.S. Senate.^[16]

One of those cosponsors, Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN), explained the reasons behind her colleagues’ willingness to risk criticism from the extreme wings of both parties in order to move the technology forward.  “The science is clear…[that] climate change is real, it’s caused by humans, and we need urgent action to address it,” she stated, but that action must be taken with an eye toward other challenges, goals, and values important to her constituents. “Carbon capture and storage is a crucial technology for reducing emissions from biofuels, steel, and other industries important to Minnesota,” she said, and apparently her cosponsors felt similarly. “You can see from the Senate coalition supporting this legislation that what’s good for our environment and good for our economy is bipartisan, as it should be.”^[17]

The Biden Administration agrees. As Michael Regan, President Biden’s administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), explained during a North Dakota visit early in his tenure, Project Tundra represents a learning opportunity for the nation. “EPA and the Biden administration are committed to listening to and engaging with stakeholders all across the country” regarding the interrelated challenges of energy reliability and climate change, and Project Tundra marks the region as a potential leader in the search for balanced solutions. “I look forward to continued engagement with North Dakota on efforts to reduce carbon emissions and reach the goal of carbon neutrality.”^[18]

Conclusion

Project Tundra promises benefits far beyond those it will bring to its financial and technology partners, or even to the local communities in eastern North Dakota and Minnesota that depend on Minnkota for reliable and sustainable electricity. Project Tundra can serve as the springboard for CCS to become available, affordable, and widely utilized across the country and even the world, helping to ensure a just, orderly, and equitable energy transition that can help stave off the greatest threats of climate change.

Thanks to bipartisan support at the federal, state, and local levels, Project Tundra stands on firm ground. As a strong fit for multiple state and federal funding opportunities and having passed an efficient, transparent permitting process, the project’s future looks bright. Anyone with a stake in the region’s and the world’s economic and environmental futures should seriously consider the project’s virtues and ask what they can do to assure that such efforts to meet our energy and climate challenges are advanced, expanded, and invigorated.

APPENDIX I.

 More on CCS

CCS has emerged “as a key mitigation option” to address GHG emissions and climate change.  CCS refers to the “entire process of capturing CO2 from the exhaust stream of fossil fuel-fired power and industrial plants, and then transporting the captured CO2 for permanent storage underground or in products.”^[19]

According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), as of September 2023, there are 15 CCS facilities operating in the U.S. Most of these are “located at plants that process natural gas or produce ethanol for fuel or ammonia for fertilizer.” “Together,” CBO wrote, “they represent the capacity to capture 0.4 percent of the nation’s total annual CO2 emissions.”

CCS is “recognized internationally as an indispensable key technology for mitigating climate change and protecting the human living environment.”^[20] According to the IEA, retrofitting carbon capture technologies is an “important solution to avoid the ‘lock-in’ of emissions from the vast fleet of existing fossil-fueled power plants while also providing plant owners with an asset protection strategy for recent investments.”^[21] 

Over time, addressing climate change through decarbonization will only become costlier if technologies such as CCS fail to fully commercialize. In fact, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has projected that the cost of climate mitigation “will rise by 138% in 2100 if CCS technologies are not adopted.”^[22]

Providing the necessary financial support for early adoption of CCS scale-up in the electric sector is critical to spurring its commercialization and, as important, its cost-effectiveness. As CBO argued, the cost of implementing CCS is “likely to influence companies’ future decisions about using the technology.” Costs may be reduced “as more CCS projects come online and illustrate how best to implement the technology.”^[23]

As noted above, it’s precisely for this reason that Congress passed incentives to help CCS technology succeed.  Companies that capture and store CO2 are eligible for the “section 45Q tax credit,” as well as $8.2 billion under the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.^[24]  These policies play “a vital role in the incentivization of CCS projects.”^[25]

APPENDIX II.

 More on Project Tundra

 Project Tundra is proposed to be one of the “world’s largest post-combustion CO2 capture and geologic storage projects.” It will be one to substantially scale up CCS technology, and in doing so, help mitigate, over time, the cost concerns noted by CBO and other experts. That’s because technological development of this kind “will be a key element of driving future cost reductions in CCS,” and it will have far-reaching beneficial consequences, such as “making CCS possible for some hard-to-abate sectors such as cement, steel, and direct air CO2 capture.”^[26]

The project’s private sector sponsors are Minnkota Power Cooperative and TC Energy, which together have formed Dakota Carbon Center East LLC, to construct and operate it. 

Minnkota is a not-for-profit electric generation and transmission cooperative headquartered in Grand Forks, North Dakota. It provides wholesale electricity to 11 member-owner cooperatives located in eastern North Dakota and northwestern Minnesota. In total, it serves 150,000 consumers, including homes, schools, and farms.^[27] Minnkota operates the Milton R. Young (MRY) lignite coal-fired power plant in North Dakota, to which CCS technology would be applied.[28]

TC Energy is a major North American energy infrastructure company, which specializes in natural gas pipeline construction and operation. The company is the commercialization lead and an investor in the project.

The CCS partnership between Minnkota and TC Energy also includes, among others, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, which is the carbon capture equipment supplier, and Kiewit, a highly respected engineering and construction company.

This partnership brings a wide range of technical expertise to the project’s design, engineering, construction, and operation. As a TC Energy executive put it, the project “is a powerful example of private industry and cooperative utilities collaborating to bring scaled change to the energy transition.” With Minnkota, Mitsubishi and Kiewit, the project will combine the “respective capabilities to deliver a de-risked commercial and technical solution.” This project “will enable the Young Station to provide power for decades to come…safely, reliably and with a significantly lower emissions profile.”^[29]

State and local leaders have offered their enthusiastic support. “Bringing together the considerable expertise and resources of these industry leaders is a huge momentum boost for the project and bodes well for its future,” North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum (R) said. “The pursuit of innovation over regulation continues to be a catalyst for capital investment in North Dakota.”

According to DOE, Project Tundra was proposed and eventually backed with federal incentives because it has a fully characterized and permitted storage complex that: (1) is able to receive and safely store CO2 in sufficient quantities to meet the DOE goals of 50 million metric tons over a 30-year period; (2) is located in proximity to one or more CO2 sources that can supply those quantities; and (3) can be connected to the sources by a transport system that can be built and operated economically.^[30]

The CCS process at Project Tundra is composed of five interrelated parts (shown in the graph below): 

• The flue gas from MRY is sent to a “scrubber,” a large machine that cools the gas and removes impurities;^[31]
• The purified gas is then sent to an “absorber” where the CO2 is captured. The gas comes into contact with an amine-based liquid solvent, which bonds with the CO2 and separates it from the gas;
• The gas then flows into a “regeneration unit,” where heat breaks down the CO2 bonds with the solvent, releasing or separating pure CO2 from the flue gas;^[32]
• Finally, the CO2 is sent to a compressor that prepares it for deep geologic storage a mile underground, where it is stored safely and permanently. (The pipeline and injection well pad are adjacent to the power plant and fall within Minnkota’s property line.)^[33]
• Moreover, in addition to reducing CO2 emissions, the CCS process will result in significant co-benefits for air quality, by reducing “criteria” pollutants, such as sulfur dioxide and particulate matter (soot).[34]

If Project Tundra moves forward, it is expected to be operational by 2029.

On December 14, 2023, DOE’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations chose the project (along with two others) as a recipient of IIJA CCS funding.  The project is under award negotiation for up to $350 million.^[35] 

Shannon Angielski, Executive Director of the Carbon Utilization Research Council, an industry coalition “focused on the responsible use of fossil energy resources,”^[36] applauded the award and noted that Project Tundra will, along with other similar projects, “provide a blueprint for how to scale CCS in order to decarbonize our economy and position the U.S. to be a global leader in developing and exporting CCS technology.”^[37]

To be eligible for federal support, Project Tundra was required to submit a “Community Benefits Plan,” which, according to DOE, will help ensure “meaningful community and labor engagement in carbon management technologies while addressing environmental burdens in partnership with communities to ensure an equitable and just energy transition.”