DECATUR - Archer Daniels Midland Co. has been selected to receive funding for a second carbon sequestration project that is in addition to one that could begin injecting carbon dioxide deep below ground next year.

The U.S. Department of Energy announced Thursday that ADM is slated to receive up to $99 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in an effort to demonstrate large-scale carbon capture and storage from industrial sources. ADM originally was selected in October 2009 for research and development grants for the project, which will total $163.9 million.

ADM plans to spend $43.6 million on the project.

"Carbon capture and sequestration technology can help significantly reduce carbon emissions by storing carbon dioxide from manufacturing operations deep underground," said Scott McDonald, director of ADM Biofuels Development. "This project will utilize and demonstrate the integrated technology that biofuels producers and other commercial-scale manufacturers can employ to reduce carbon emissions."

The additional federal funding will allow for the design, construction and operation phase to begin. The new project will capture and sequester 1 million tons of CO2 per year from ADM's existing ethanol plant in Decatur. The planned start is August 2012.

According to ADM, it plans to construct and operate a collection, compression and dehydration facility capable of delivering 2,755 tons per day of carbon dioxide to the injection and sequestration site. In all, it plans to capture more than 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide with a scheduled conclusion in the third quarter of 2015.

The testing of large-scale industrial carbon capture and storage is seen as an important step toward eventual commercial deployment.

"Capturing carbon emissions and storing them underground is a crucial technology as we build a clean-energy future and address the threat of climate change," Energy Secretary Steven Chu said.

The CO2 will be sequestered in the Mount Simon Sandstone, a saline water-bearing rock formation already being tested for carbon sequestration purposes beneath ADM's Decatur campus.

The Illinois State Geological Survey is leading a project announced in January 2008 to store carbon dioxide more than a mile beneath ADM property. Once injection begins, up to 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide over three years is to be converted into liquid form from ADM's ethanol plant.

Injection is scheduled to begin in February 2011.

The drilling of a monitoring well is the next step in that project, said Sallie Greenberg, sequestration communications coordinator for the Illinois Geological Survey.

"Everybody's been working so hard, it will be nice to get to the point where we're injecting CO2 into the ground, and you can start to monitor and really demonstrate that we can do it safely and effectively," Greenberg said.

A real-time monitoring system has been developed for that project and is in place, starting to get data, Greenberg said.

The information that has been gathered already will benefit similar projects in the works, including FutureGen, the Taylorville Energy Center and the new carbon storage project at ADM, Greenberg said. ADM and the Geological Survey are partnering with Schlumberger Carbon Services on both projects.

"We're really becoming a center for energy research and connection between biofuels and sequestration," Greenberg said. "This area is really looking forward to what our energy and climate possibilities are in the future."

U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., hopes Central Illinois will be a leader in addressing the nation's energy needs in a cleaner, more efficient way.

"Developing technologies like large-scale carbon capture and storage is critical to our continued use of coal without causing more harm to the environment," Durbin said.

The latest effort at ADM will store two and a half times more carbon dioxide than the first and is one of three projects in a $1.4 billion effort to capture CO2 from industrial sources for storage or beneficial use. A project in Texas will capture CO2 from a steam methane reformer and another project in Louisiana will do the same from a methanol plant.

In total, the three projects are expected to capture and store 6.5 million tons of CO2 per year, or the equivalent of taking 1 million cars off the road, and increase domestic production of oil by more than 10 million barrels per year by the end of the demonstration period in September 2015.

The Energy Department indicated more funding for the projects is possible.

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