The following article was published in the Grand Forks Herald on Sept. 23.

‍GRAND FORKS — As Minnkota Power Cooperative continues work to place a carbon-capture project in central North Dakota, the company’s president and CEO wants people to know he believes Project Tundra is a solution that will help bridge the gap between today’s carbon industry and the cleaner energy sources of tomorrow.

Although Tundra is lauded by many — including all three of the state's federal delegates and Gov. Doug Burgum — Minnkota's Mac McLennan knows criticism is aimed at the billion-dollar project, which he hopes will officially move forward within the next year.

If groundbreaking does occur and the project becomes reality, it will indeed extend the life of North Dakota’s coal-fired energy industry, likely causing no little angst among green-energy advocates. But, McLennan believes, it also will ensure reliable power for the region — while decarbonizing the electric industry — as modern energy sources are further developed.

“Part of the concern, from my perspective, is people view this as a desperate effort to save our coal plants. It’s really a part in ensuring that you have looked at all of your suite of generation opportunities today and into the future in a decarbonized world. To me, it’s part of the puzzle,” McLennan told the Grand Forks Herald. “At the end of the day, I just want to make sure we can produce reasonable electricity for people who live in this region. I’m left with a set of opportunities, potentially, based on where we live and the assets we have and the geology and a whole bunch of potentially positive things, to have a chance to utilize those.

”In June, U.S. Sen. Kevin Cramer announced Project Tundra was moving into its final stages of early development — that is, the work leading up to finally deciding if the project will move forward.

Project Tundra seeks to annually capture up to 4 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, which in turn will be stored more than a mile underground in geologic formations. It’s a collaborative effort between energy partners Minnkota Power, TC Energy, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Kiewit. Minnkota, however, is the lead project developer.

Operations will take place at the coal-based Milton R. Young Power Station near Center, North Dakota. The estimated cost is approximately $1.4 billion, although that number could fluctuate due to changing prices prior to construction. Minnkota considers it a “high-level estimate” on the capital cost, with the number to be refined through the final development phase.

“I would say today, you would have to have something go significantly wrong in the next several months for us not to be in a position to make a decision,” said McLennan, who believes a decision on moving forward with actual construction will come in the first half of 2024.

The biggest hurdle, he said, is getting certain price guarantees on materials, as well as moving through the permitting and regulatory process. Landowners in the region are in favor of the project, McLennan and Gov. Burgum say, because of the economic opportunities that Project Tundra presents.

‍ND's 'trifecta'

‍North Dakota is well-positioned to lead the nation’s carbon-capture efforts, Burgum told the Herald earlier this year, because of a “trifecta” of circumstances.

First, he said, North Dakota is one of just two states able to permit a CO2 well.“We have the ability to do the permitting. We have our regulations in place. We’ve got primacy away from the EPA, and we don’t have to get EPA permission to permit a well, as long as everybody is following our rules,” he said.

Second is the state’s storage area and, notably, pooling agreements.

“We wouldn’t have an oil industry if we didn’t have pooling agreements,” the governor said. That means “if you get the supermajority in that group to say they want to develop these materials, everybody else gets rolled in. The majority gets a chance to rule as opposed to being ruled by the minority.

”Third is the Legislature’s efforts to nix indefinite liability. After a company stops storing CO2 — say, after 50 years — the company will only be liable for the storage space for a decade more. At that point, the liability reverts to the state, rather than the company.

“We’re sitting on this thing that is unbelievable,” Burgum said. “I have people say, ‘Hey, I’m against CO2.’ I tell them they can be against CO2 transportation and storage as long as you are comfortable being against the entire oil and gas industry, the entire coal industry and the entire ag industry, because ag is going to be driven by corn and soybeans, and corn and soybeans will be driven by fuels, and now we have all these plants coming here. … But if you are for all the things we can do to decarbonize the planet and help lead the way on clean energy, and if you’re for North Dakota and every North Dakota community …then you probably should say, ‘Hey, we’ve been blessed with the soil, blessed with the minerals, and now we’re blessed with the CO2 storage.’

”Not everybody agrees with the governor. A report earlier this summer — written by the North Dakota News Cooperative and published in a number of the state’s newspapers — noted that experts outside of the state are raising questions about the project.

According to the report, Project Tundra “will be expensive (and) costs of producing energy will also rise due to the technology needed to capture the emissions and pump them deep underground.

”For some, the expenses don’t make sense, the story noted.

“The Milton Young plant is 50 years old, for God’s sakes, and coal plants don’t tend to last much longer than that,” Dennis Wamsted, a Boston-based energy analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, told North Dakota News Cooperative. “Basically, you’re putting carbon-capture on a facility that was scheduled to shut down in the very near future. That makes no sense to us. There are many viable options to replace that power. They’re here now, they’re clean, and they’re cheap and reliable.”

McLennan’s response? Think of it in terms of a used car.

“We can talk about it being a 50-year-old plant, but it’s like a 50-year-old car with a new engine,” he said. “That’s not to say we don’t have to replace the brakes and all of the other consumables that will eventually (wear out), but we can’t think of it as a dilapidated thing that is falling down.

”The “new engine,” so to speak, is in the form of approximately $500 million in investments since the early 2000s, McLennan said.

“Part of that is emissions controls. … We have made a substantial investment in that. And in 2007, we put a new electrical system in the plant, replacing all of the parts,” he said. “We made investments in the boiler, we made investments in the turbine, we made investments in the piping.

”According to literature compiled and distributed by Minnkota, the plant is “ready for another 30 years of operation.

”Meanwhile, the “far too fast” retirement of resources — generation plants with years of useful life remaining, for example — is threatening the power grid’s ability to “keep the lights on,” according to Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioner Mark Christie. In testimony made before the U.S. Senate in May, Christie said the country is headed for “potentially catastrophic consequences.

”In his testimony, which can be found on YouTube, Christie said his concern is not the addition of renewable resources such as wind and solar, but instead the subtraction of existing resources, such as coal and gas.

“The core of the problem is actually very simple. We are retiring dispatchable generating resources at a pace and an amount that is far too fast and far too great and it is threatening our ability to keep the lights on,” he said.

Along with McLennan's used car analogy, here's one more: Minnkota Vice President of External Affairs Stacey Dahl said balancing the energy grid — fossil fuels on one side and renewable sources on the other — is a bit like a playground teeter-totter. It’s not always easy to maintain the right balance, she said.

“We have an aggressive renewable portfolio in our company’s resource profile,” she said. “Wind is a phenomenal challenge to manage within our own system, but as it becomes a greater part of this broader grid, it’s becoming a real challenge to keep the system in balance — to keep that teeter-totter level.”

As utility companies evaluate energy sources of the future, there are constraints on what can be built, she said.

Gaining landowner acceptance for new projects — even renewable projects — isn’t always easy, she said, and transportation can be pricey. New coal plants are out of the question and new gas facilities are increasingly challenging, Dahl said.

What about nuclear power?

“That’s even more challenging to build because of expense and lack of certainty around disposal of the product,” she said.

‍Immediate concerns

‍According to Dahl, some might wonder why the energy industry cannot universally “get with the times.” The industry is indeed looking forward, McLennan and Dahl insist, but two concerns exist in the near future.

“The wind really doesn’t always blow, and there are service reliability concerns, ”Dahl said.

Minnkota’s interview with the Herald was in late August. During the meeting, Dahl described “another close call last week that probably most of the public doesn’t know about.” High temperatures nationwide came amid a span of low renewable energy output.

When that happens, “the grid becomes jeopardized very quickly. That’s where maintaining these (fossil fuel-based) assets continues to make a lot of sense for utilities.

”Concerns come in the winter, too, McLennan said, because on the coldest days, most wind generation grinds to a halt.

“The answer can’t be we’re going to go to all wind, and we can’t go to all solar,” he said. “So there is this transition period, whether it’s nuclear or gas or carbon-managed coal or something for a period of time. … The reality is that we are going to have to keep resources on-line that turn on when you press the button and recognize at the same time that we have to transition to a less carbon-intense set of electric resources.”

Minnkota officials believe the project won’t have much, if any, impact on customer rates. McLennan predicts it to be “rate neutral.

”Federal tax credits — $85 per metric ton of CO2 stored — will offset costs. The project is expected to cost $1.4 billion, plus $100 million annually to operate; upwards of 4 million tons of CO2 will be captured each year, according to projections.

McLennan considers himself pragmatic about the future of energy.

“We appreciate that we are going to move this way, but if you ask me to go to all green when it’s 20 degrees below zero, I’m going to have a lot of really upset people,” he said.

But, again, critics exist. In the July report written by the North Dakota News Cooperative, Paul Jensen, interim director of the Fargo-based Citizens Local Energy Action Network, said the project is akin to “trying to revive a dead corpse.”

In an op-ed he wrote shortly after the North Dakota News Cooperative story was published, McLennan said critics of the project have created “a disheartening contradiction: Many of the same people pushing for immediate reductions in carbon emissions are also directly opposing Minnkota’s efforts to become one of the fastest decarbonizing utilities in the nation.”

A few weeks later, when discussing the project with the Herald, McLennan said he has heard the criticism and even he does not have all of the answers. However, he doesn’t want to stand still, either.

“I’m not going to say we don’t fail. Lots of things fail in the technology development world,” he said. “I don’t want to be naive enough to believe I have the solution, but I also don’t want to be criticized for not trying to put apiece or part into what might be a solution long-term.”