I GREW UP IN a landscape of lies. As a child, I was told that every lake in North Dakota freezes. This isn’t true. One lake — Nelson Lake, my home lake — doesn’t freeze.

In the 1960s, when generational coal plants were first built in south-central North Dakota, the Square Butte Creek in Oliver County, a small, squiggly stream that eventually empties into the wide, muddy Missouri River, was dammed, and Nelson Lake was created to help with fossil fuel extraction.

In childhood, I roamed the rocky shores of Nelson Lake with worms and bobbers to catch fish with my Grandpa Hatzenbihler. I spent hour after hour in the shadow of the Milton R. Young Power Plant, its blocky structure pierced with two enormous cigarette-colored smokestacks. The power plant was a type of postmodern-volcano-skyscraper that framed my life in the city of Center, North Dakota.

The power plant was an eerie Polaris that allowed me to navigate my way toward home.

The plant was always within view. On nighttime trips back into coal country from Bismarck, where my family would buy groceries, shop for clothing, or go out to eat at Fiesta Villa, The Ground Round, or The Walrus, I could clock how far we were from home by where we were in relationship to the glowing and blinking lights of Minnkota Power. The lights colored low-laying clouds amber. The power plant was an eerie Polaris that allowed me to navigate my way toward home.

From the Square Butte Creek golf course, I’d tee-up on hole number one and aim squarely at Minnkota Power. On clear days, from the bay window in our home, I could glimpse a trail of smoke swirling into the air. All that lignite and fire was never far from my mind.

Though we never said it at the time, it’s clear to me now that I grew up in a company town. Coal colored my childhood, sponsored baseball tournaments, fueled pancake breakfast fundraisers, gave me food, clothing, and shelter. It was the resource that gave eastern North Dakota and western Minnesota electricity, and it gave those of us that pulled it from the ground in south-central North Dakota money, a type of financial security in a region where, previously, most men ranched or farmed.

North Dakota is home to the world’s largest known deposit of lignite coal, estimated to last nearly eight hundred years with current consumption rates. But with increasing calls to leave fossil fuel development in the past, my home power plant is now the world test site for a new fossil fuel technology: carbon capture and storage.

DEVELOPED WITHIN THE past few decades, carbon capture and storage technology draws carbon dioxide from power plants and other factories onsite, converts the gas to a liquid under high pressure, and, in the case of Minnkota Power, which has labeled their carbon capture and storage development plan Project Tundra, shoots it six thousand feet directly underground to a geologic layer of Earth called caprock. Here, apparently, the liquid carbon dioxide will stay forever. (In other cases, the carbon is transported elsewhere before being piped underground for storage). In theory, the technology will allow factories to stop using the atmosphere as the dumping ground for their gassy waste and instead create an underground sewage system of liquid carbon dioxide. In reality, it has not yet proven effective. Since most natural gas and liquids can move through the tiniest fractures and holes, eventually, what is stored in the caprock under North Dakota farms, schools, and towns will find its way back up and through to the water table and surface.

This technology will not be limited only to Minnkota Power or North Dakota.

In 2023, the Biden administration announced that it would spend up to $1.2 billion to advance the development of two commercial-scale direct air capture facilities in Texas and Louisiana as part of its emissions-reduction efforts. These projects — the first of this scale in the United States — aim to “kickstart a nationwide network of large-scale carbon removal sites,” the US Department of Energy said in a statement announcing the project in August 2023. There are about 15 carbon capture facilities operating in the US right now. An additional 121 CCS facilities are under construction or in development, including Project Tundra.

These facilities don’t run in isolation. Existing carbon storage operations are already supported by more than 5,300 miles of pipelines, and since existing fossil fuel pipelines cannot be used to transport liquid carbon dioxide (it needs chrome-lined pipelines), the advent of carbon capture and storage will unleash a pipeline-building frenzy across the country from North Dakota to Texas, California to Maine. These pipes will be upwards of 48 inches in diameter and built along existing fossil fuel infrastructural pipelines which carry oil and natural gas.

But here’s the thing about liquid carbon dioxide: If it meets with any moisture, it converts to carbonic acid, a heavy, colorless, odorless gas that destroys all animal life and can be fatal to humans as well. If breathed, it acts as a narcotic poison, inducing sleep, torpor, and death.

In 2020, a 24-inch liquid carbon dioxide pipeline near Satartia, Mississippi, ruptured, sending a carbonic acid cloud into the air. Two hundred people were evacuated from the area and 45 people were hospitalized. People were found in their cars, along ditches, shaking and foaming at the mouth. Luckily no one died in that incident, but some residents are still dealing with long term health issues from carbonic acid poisoning, including severe asthma attacks, headaches, and trouble concentrating.

Project Tundra, though, has hit a snag. Originally estimated at $1.4 billion, the project’s cost has risen to $2 billion. New federal emissions regulations have compounded uncertainty around the project’s viability. The new regulations require coal-fired power plants to shut down by 2039 if they cannot cut or capture 90 percent of their CO₂ emissions by 2032. The rules include similar emissions restrictions on new natural gas-fired power plants. It’s uncertain yet whether Project Tundra would allow Minnkota Power to fully comply with the new federal regulations.

Project Tundra could just be the beginning when it comes to carbon capture in North Dakota.

Uncertain as its future may be, Project Tundra could just be the beginning when it comes to carbon capture in North Dakota. At least that’s the hope of Iowa-based Summit Carbon Solutions. Spearheaded by former Iowa Board of Regents president, Bruce Rastetter. A Republican megadonor, Rastetter is infamous for resigning from the board after trying to leverage political power at Iowa State University to develop a transgenic banana in Tanzania that would displace over 800,000 acres of local farms in that country.

Summit Carbon Solutions has partnered with 57 Midwestern ethanol plants with the aim of capturing and storing their emissions. The plan is to ship their liquid carbon dioxide waste to North Dakota, meaning North Dakota will serve as the region’s underground waste pit. In order to facilitate this, the company has negotiated access to Project Tundra’s carbon storage facility, and begun partnering with Minnkota Power to develop additional storage sites in the region. The company has also contracted with large corporate enterprises, such as Halliburton, to help with drilling, and has on its team former-Iowa-governor-turned-ambassador Terry Branstad, who supported the development of the Dakota Access Pipeline in Iowa.

With Summit Carbon Solutions’ interest in Project Tundra and carbon capture storage technology as a whole, the technology effectively links Big Ag to the fossil fuel industry, allowing not only Minnkota Power to continue burning coal, but also dozens of ethanol plants to continue converting crops like corn into fuel under the premise of capturing their emissions.

This isn’t the only way that carbon capture technology perpetuates fossil fuel extraction and other high-carbon-emission fuels. Liquid carbon dioxide can also be substituted for water in the process of hydraulic fracturing, which means that power plants, which would normally be taxed at a higher rate for emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as a waste product, would now receive a carbon “credit” for capturing their emissions, selling them to oil and natural gas industries, and facilitating further fracking across North Dakota, the country, and the world. While this development could eliminate water from the process of fracking, it still allows for global dependency on the fossil fuel industry for heating, cooling, and electrifying homes.

As the Science and Environmental Health Network (SEHN) reports: “‘Carbon use’ refers to many hypothetical ways to transform captured CO₂ into a limited-market product that can be sold. Today the only commercial use for captured CO₂ is to pump it into depleted oil fields to flush out more oil; for every ton of CO₂ pumped into a depleted oil field, 2 to 5 tons of CO₂ are emitted into the atmosphere, which defeats the purpose of capturing the CO₂ in the first place. The plain fact is, there is no market (and never can be) for billions of tons of dangerous hazardous waste CO₂.”

WHEN I CLOSE my eyes and imagine the landscape of my childhood, I see the shimmering cottonwood leaves of the Missouri River, a bald eagle in sharp profile, the tawny grass swaying in the wind. Then the images of coal plants bricked on the bank of the river, scattered across Oliver, Mercer, and McLean counties fill my mind. I think of the number of people I know who have fought, or are currently battling, cancer. And I wonder why so many resources are being pushed to develop a new technology that will keep us bound to a nineteenth-century way of fueling our twenty-first-century lives. How we could be a model for living better on the planet and stop telling ourselves the lie that this is the way it is, this is the way it has always been.

I want my home to stop telling lies and to let every lake in North Dakota, finally, freeze.