Great Plains Synfuels Plant

The Great Plains carbon capture project is built around the Dakota Gasification Company’s Great Plains Synfuels Plant near Beulah, North Dakota. Since 2000, the plant has captured CO₂ produced during coal gasification and sent it through a roughly 205-mile pipeline to oil fields in Saskatchewan, Canada for enhanced oil recovery under the Weyburn-Midale project. The stream comes from the plant’s cleanup processes and has been supplied at roughly 2 to 3 million metric tons of CO₂ per year to those storage and EOR operations. In February 2024, Dakota Gas brought an expanded on-site geologic sequestration system into service that captures and stores CO₂ in the Broom Creek sandstone formation adjacent to the Synfuels Plant. That new facility is expected to capture up to about 2.25 million metric tons of CO₂ annually, and by late 2024 the project had already sequestered over 1 million metric tons. Captured CO₂ is transported via plant pipelines either into the long-established Canadian EOR pipeline network or into permanent underground storage near the plant. The Broom Creek reservoir has been assessed as having very large storage potential.