Red Trail Energy gets green light for North Dakota’s first Class VI well

In North Dakota, North Dakota’s regulatory framework for geologic sequestration of carbon dioxide (CO2) is leading the nation again as the North Dakota Industrial Commission approved the first Class VI well in North Dakota. North Dakota was the first state to receive primacy of Class VI wells from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 2018, followed only by Wyoming in 2020.
Orders written by the Department of Mineral Resources (DMR), and signed by the Commission, approve Red Trail Energy LLC (RTE) to geologically store CO2 from the RTE ethanol facility located near Richardton. Orders signed also determine the financial responsibilities and approve of the amalgamation of the storage reservoir pore space required to operate the facility. The RTE facility currently emits an average of 180,000 metric tons of high-purity CO2 annually from the fermentation process during ethanol production. This approval allows RTE to commercially capture (dehydrate and compress) and inject the 180,000-metric-ton-per-year CO2 stream into the Broom Creek Formation on RTE property for permanent geologic CO2 storage.