A plan to bury carbon under remote farmland in Indiana would be a major blow to climate change, proponents say, but it’s all generously funded by U.S. taxpayers.
But as far as Melissa Harrison and other residents of Climbers, Indiana are concerned, that may be the end for their town. “This is our place,” she says. Generations of her family are buried in this cemetery, and she raises her five grandchildren in one of dozens of white clapboard homes surrounded by cornfields and agricultural mills.
Now, a local ethanol plant is leading a project to bury vast amounts of carbon deep in the geological formations that run beneath the town and surrounding farms.
Government subsidies for the scheme, which aims to combat global warming, are so generous that companies across the country are rushing to get approval for similar projects.
Melissa Harrison (left), her grandson Aidan, grandson Michael (left), Delise (center), and Mary Lee play outside their home in Climbers, Indiana, on July 7, 2026.
But residents around some of these carbon sequestration projects are organizing to stop them, and climbers are at the epicenter of new national tensions over these projects.
International climate watchers say that while carbon sequestration projects can be a secondary tool to help curb global warming, they also argue that the primary focus should be on urgent and deep cuts in fossil fuels. Some environmental groups question the benefits of carbon sequestration, worrying that it could slow the transition to clean energy and pose risks to surrounding communities.
Harrison said the town of Climbers is already overburdened with hazards from industrial agricultural facilities such as fertilizer supply companies, hazardous waste recycling companies and the giant ethanol plant that is proposing the project. She said the region faces contaminated well water, lack of sanitation facilities and high poverty rates.
Once warmly remembered as a thriving “Heartland” community with a beautiful white church, two grocery stores, a Chevrolet dealership and a diner, the town is now struggling. Schools are closed. The old Methodist church has been demolished, and the playground is surrounded by trailer tanks of fertilizer that a fertilizer company rents out to nearby farms.
Harrison, like other residents in the area, received a letter about the project. Some were asked to receive $150 a year in exchange for a carbon sink on their property.
On July 7, 2026, Melissa Harrison visits her family’s burial site at Climbers Cemetery. Most of the deceased family members are buried here.
“If they make the climbers so bad that no one wants to live here, they can take over the whole town for really cheap,” she said.
Anderson’s Renewables, the company proposing the project, said in a statement to the Guardian that the project is “a safe, well-established technology with rigorous permitting, engineering and monitoring processes to protect groundwater, public health and the surrounding environment.”
“The proposed project would capture carbon dioxide from the ethanol production process, compress it, and inject it deep underground into geological formations identified for permanent storage over 3,000 feet,” the statement said.
“Through seismic analysis and the drilling of test wells, we were able to determine the suitability of the site,” it added.
The company, which was partially owned by a subsidiary of Marathon Oil at the time it proposed the project, said in a statement that it understands residents’ reasons for concerns and intends to work transparently with the community to allay those concerns.
Anhydrous ammonia is stored near a park in Climbers, Indiana on July 7, 2026.
The project is one of dozens of carbon sequestration projects expected to be given the green light for construction in the U.S. by the Environmental Protection Agency and state environmental regulators next year, as a slew of permit applications by companies reach the final stages of the approval process. Oil industry companies are often sponsors and backers of these projects.
Carbon sequestration involves capturing industrial CO2 emissions that would normally be released into the atmosphere before they contribute to global warming and burying them in rock formations thousands of feet underground for what proponents say is permanent storage.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said carbon capture and storage (CCS) is one mitigation measure that could help limit global warming, assuming it supports significant reductions in fossil fuels, but warned that it should not be overly relied on. Both Democratic and Republican presidential administrations have supported such plans in the past few years. The Biden administration authorized a favorable tax credit redemption program for them as part of the Inflation Control Act.
Anderson ethanol plant and grain elevator in Clymers, Indiana, July 7, 2026.
The Trump administration, which has called the climate crisis a “hoax” and halted funding for many other types of climate change projects, continued this tax credit, which often benefits energy companies already using underground technologies such as hydraulic fracturing. It offers companies a transferable tax credit of $85 per tonne of point-source carbon stored, an incentive that has sparked what some are calling a “carbon capture gold rush.”
Brad Johnston, an analyst at Enverus, an energy industry market research firm and data company that tracks permitting for these types of projects, said the tax credits could provide huge benefits, as even the smallest projects are expected to store hundreds of thousands of tons of carbon each year. Many have been proposed for ethanol plants, which emit a nearly pure stream of CO2 and make it easy to capture and bury the emissions underground.
Only a handful of projects have been implemented, but a “big wave” is about to be approved, Johnston said.
Cass County Fair held in Logansport, Indiana on July 7, 2026.
Experts say the money coming to these companies from tax credits from these carbon projects could rival the revenue they receive from selling the actual ethanol itself, potentially doubling the plants’ profits.
Many environmental groups have criticized the projects, saying they only subsidize oil and gas companies and do not ensure large-scale emissions reductions.
For example, a small project that sequesters 200,000 tons of carbon per year could earn $17 million per year through a tax credit called 45Q. The large project plans to sequester tens of millions of tons of carbon, said Kerwin Olson, executive director of the Citizens Action Coalition, an Indiana group that has helped organize residents to oppose many of the projects proposed in Indiana.
“I can do the math,” he said. “That’s a lot of cash. A lot of cash.”
“You’re talking billions of dollars.”
July 7, 2026 on Main Street in Climbers, Indiana.
Environmental experts say the risks of carbon storage include earthquakes, water table contamination and potentially deadly carbon leaks, and point to several instances where carbon leaks have occurred.
In 2024, the nation’s first commercial carbon capture project occurred under a lake that provides drinking water to much of central Illinois, resulting in two leaks. The state subsequently banned new CCS projects under one of the state’s largest aquifers.
In 2020, a carbon dioxide pipeline burst in rural Mississippi, causing a mass poisoning that left 45 people hospitalized and 200 evacuated. Emergency workers found people lying on the ground, unable to breathe, but had no idea what was happening. “It was like we were living through a zombie apocalypse,” Jack Willingham, emergency director for the affected county, told NPR.
Melissa Harrison outside her home in Climbers, Indiana, on July 7, 2026.
Charles Harvey, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), helped found one of the world’s first companies dedicated to sequestering carbon to prevent global warming in the early 2000s. Since then, however, he has become adamantly opposed to this strategy, admitting that he feels a sense of guilt similar to that felt by J. Robert Oppenheimer regarding the invention of the atomic bomb.
“That’s the stupidest way to reduce emissions,” Harvey said. He said oil companies were lobbying hard for the project but believed the carbon emissions problem could be best tackled if the money was spent on renewable energy.
“This is loved by the industry because it’s a subsidy for what the industry is already doing,” he says.
Johnston, the Enverus analyst, said he felt that given the setback caused by the Illinois breach, companies may be paying particular attention to project design to avoid further problems.
“I think any further setbacks due to leaks or failures in any of these wells would be quite detrimental to the CCS industry,” he said. “So I think a lot of these operators are very intent on doing things right and have probably overbuilt a lot of these systems.”
Farmland near the Anderson ethanol plant and grain elevator in Clymers, Indiana, July 7, 2026.
The companies sponsoring the Climbers Project convened a meeting of residents and landowners in the area and informed them that the carbon storage is completely safe and there is no chance of it leaking.
“I said it’s bullshit. I’m worried about my well,” said farmer Dennis Crews, who refused to sign a document offering $150 an acre to accept the plan. But experts say Indiana law essentially strips individual landowners of the right to reject such offers.
Crum grows soybeans and corn on some land around Clymers, some of which he leases from other owners. He keeps a few cows in the grassy field behind his house and tries to grow everything his family eats in his garden. However, he is concerned about the pollution occurring around him.
“I’m trying to take care of them,” said Krume, whose 11 grandchildren live nearby. “We have to do something for the environment.”
