Continental Resources invests $250 million in Midwest carbon capture project

The oil and gas company Continental Resources is investing $250 million over the next two years to help build "the largest carbon capture and sequestration project of its kind in the world," the project's developer said.

Summit Carbon Solutions announced the investment March 2, adding that the project will capture and transport via pipeline 8 million mt/year of CO2 from 31 ethanol plants across the US Midwest. That carbon will then be sequestered in subsurface geologic formations in North Dakota, where Continental Resources will leverage its geologic expertise gained from its extensive oil and gas drilling operations in the Bakken Shale.

The $4.5 billion carbon capture project was launched in early 2021 and aims to being operations in the first half of 2024. The project will have the capability of expanding to ultimately transport up to 20 million mt/year, Summit Carbon Solutions said.

"Our goal since launching Summit Carbon Solutions has been to accelerate ethanol's path to becoming a net zero carbon fuel, which can be done in the near term and with proven technology," said Summit Ag Investors President Justin Kirchhoff. "To accomplish that, we first partnered with forward-thinking ethanol producers, and we now look forward to working with Continental Resources, which has unmatched experience and knowledge of the Williston Basin in North Dakota, where we will permanently sequester our partner plants' CO2."

Continental Resources has been a major driller in North Dakota's Bakken Shale oil reservoir for over two decades and is the state's largest leaseholder and producer.

"No company knows the geology better than we do," said its founder and chairman Harold Hamm. "The regulatory environment is second to none and we are grateful to North Dakota's leadership, who has been laying the groundwork for a project like this and been a leader in sequestration for nearly 20 years."

In 2018, North Dakota became the first state to receive authority from the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate and issue permits for carbon sequestration wells. The state awarded its first carbon injection well permit last year to an ethanol manufacturing facility in Southwest North Dakota. Wyoming is the only other state that has received regulatory authority over carbon injection wells.

The Summit Carbon Solutions project is not the only carbon capture system coming to the Midwest. Navigator CO2 Ventures has proposed a 1,300-miles pipeline network known as the Heartland Greenway that will transport carbon from industrial and biofuel producers in Illinois, Minnesota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Iowa to a geologic sequestration site in Illinois.

The Heartland Greenway, which is commercially anchored by Valero, will have the capacity to transport and sequester up to 15 million mt/year of CO2. Construction is expected to begin in 2023, with phased-in operations beginning in late 2024 and 2025.

According S&P Global Commodity Insights, the assessed price of tech carbon capture credits – a basket assessment that reflects credits issued by a range of technology projects that remove emissions – was $144/mt of CO2e as of March 2.