Google’s Green Energy Bet 🌳: Carbon Capture for a Cleaner Future!

Google said today that it will invest in a natural gas power plant in Illinois that intends to capture the majority of its carbon emissions.

The 400-megawatt power plant will be built outside of Decatur next to an ethanol plant run by Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), which already captures CO₂ from its operations. Google will buy most of the electricity to power its nearby data centers, while ADM will use some of the power plant’s steam and electricity. Low Carbon Infrastructure is developing the new project.  

Google intends to capture “approximately 90%” of the CO₂ generated by the power plant, the company said.

Carbon dioxide from Google’s power plant will be injected into the same geological storage formations already used by ADM’s ethanol facility. The site is the location of the first long-term CO₂ storage well in the U.S.

Typically, around 2,000 metric tons of CO₂ are sent into the well every day. But injections there were halted in 2024 when salty brine, which stores dissolved CO2 deep underground, was found to have migrated into “unauthorized zones,” according to the EPA. ADM said the leak was the result of corrosion at a monitoring well, E&E News reported, and they’ve since resumed injections.

While carbon capture and storage (CCS) shows great promise at reducing carbon emissions from coal and natural gas power plants, it has a mixed record in the field. 

A recent study of 13 CCS facilities representing 55% of all captured carbon shows that most aren’t living up to expectations. An ExxonMobil facility in Wyoming, which processes natural gas, has been capturing 36% less than expected. The most analogous to Google’s project, a 115-megawatt power plant in Canada, has only captured about 50% what it had promised.

CCS, when it works, can help mitigate pollution from burning natural gas to generate power, but it won’t do anything to address the methane leaks that occur throughout the natural gas supply chain. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, generating 84 times more warming over 20 years than carbon dioxide.

As a result, leaks can significantly change the carbon accounting. With leakage rates of just 2%, burning natural gas unabated puts it on par with coal. Capturing the carbon will reduce that figure, but it can’t eliminate the warming generated by extracting and transporting natural gas.