After bill signing, commission to study carbon capture at Mahomet
Aquifer
[August 07, 2025]
By Jim Talamonti | The Center Square
(The Center Square) – A water, land and wildlife advocate says a new law
restricting carbon sequestration will protect most of the Mahomet
Aquifer.
One of 124 bills Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed last Friday, Senate Bill 1723
is slated to take effect Jan. 1.
Prairie Rivers Network Climate Policy Director Andrew Rehn supported the
measure to protect the drinking-water source for nearly a million people
in Central Illinois.
“The recharge areas were not included, and that’s a loss. It’s not
perfect in that way, but it is protecting the vast majority of the
aquifer in a way that I think is really impactful and substantial,” Rehn
told The Center Square.
The new law also provides for the formation of a task force to study
risks to the aquifer.
In collaboration with the Prairie Research Institute at the University
of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, The Mahomet Aquifer Advisory Study
Commission will be expected to provide a report on carbon capture and
storage (CCS) by the end of 2030.
Rehn said five years is a tight time frame to review risks.
“Our push for this legislation was that we are scaling up CCS in a
massive way and we are proposing to do that in an experiment under our
aquifer, and that just doesn’t make sense,” Rehn explained. “At the rate
and scale at which these things move, five years isn’t enough to learn
what some of these other large-scale projects that are going online, to
learn how they’re operating and to run into any possible mistakes
they’re going to have.”
Two leaks were detected at Archer Daniels Midland’s carbon capture
facility in Decatur last year.
State Rep. Carol Ammons, D-Urbana, sponsored the House version of SB
1723. Ammons was asked about the advisory commission on the Illinois
House floor May 20.
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“There’s appointments that are made by the governor as well as the House
and the Senate to include community members as well on this task force,”
Ammons said.
The law provides that the director of the Illinois Environmental
Protection Agency shall call the advisory commission’s first meeting no
later than 90 days after the law takes effect.
State Rep. Brandun Schweizer, R-Danville, spoke in favor of the bill
and said a lot of constituents have concerns about sequestering.
“I know it’s relatively local to Central Illinois, but it also
affects Greater Illinois if something were to happen to that
aquifer,” Schweizer said.
State Sen. Chapin Rose, R-Mahomet, filed Senate Bill 3963 in July of
2024 to ban carbon sequestration under the federally-designated
“sole source” Mahomet Aquifer last summer following Pritzker’s
signing of Senate Bill 1289, which allowed carbon sequestration
under the aquifer.
“This is a long-overdue win for the people of central Illinois who
fought tirelessly to protect our clean water. While I’m frustrated
it took the governor this long to do the right thing, I’m grateful
he finally heard the message loud and clear — Central Illinois will
not be a dumping ground for risky carbon experiments,” Rose said in
a statement.
In 2015, the Environmental Protection Agency designated a portion of
the Mahomet Aquifer system in east-central Illinois as a sole source
aquifer. More than half of the population in east-central Illinois
relies on the system as a source of drinking water.
The Safe Drinking Water Act gives the EPA authority to designate all
or part of an aquifer as a “sole source” if contamination of the
aquifer would create a significant hazard to public health and there
are no physically available or economically-feasible alternative
sources of drinking water to serve the population that relies on the
aquifer. |
