Production funding for state of changes provided by the Backland Charitable Trust.

Carbon is the key to life on Earth.

Whether it walks, standstill, or falls from the sky, carbon makes life possible.

But too much carbon dioxide is putting our planet in peril.

The science is undeniable.

And the cost of inaction is keeps mounting.

Climate change is truly loading the weather dice against us putting us all at risk.

We are on course for devastating changes to our climate.

Will the Illinois we know now be the same place for our children.

Today we'll talk about what carbon is and what happens when it changes.

What effects does carbon have on our weather, our air and our water will show you a real threat that lies next to a beloved for us.

See how Illinois Ian's are leading the way when it comes to new lower carbon building materials.

We absolutely live off the grid.

I mean, just factually, we're not connected.

And we'll visit a growing business that's seen green by living green.

from Illinois public media, this is state of change.

Hello, I'm Tinisha Spain.

We start with an explanation of the word carbon.

Sure we've all heard the word carbon before but unless you're a scientist the meaning the definition of the essential building blocks of life on earth could be a mystery.

The first thing to know carbon is an element that's all around us.

Life forms are carbon based.

So we have organic molecules that are combinations of carbon hydrogen oxygen.

Sallie Greenberg is a geologist at the University of Illinois and the Principal Research Scientist for the Illinois State Geologic Survey.

Energy and minerals are her specialty rocks are her passion.

Sally reminded us of a lesson from middle school science class about carbon plants and people.

Plants take carbon dioxide in they use that to build material emit oxygen, which we use to breathe, we take in oxygen and emit carbon dioxide.

So it's a cycle.

Carbon dioxide is the primary greenhouse gas emission that we think about.

Carbon dioxide is everywhere in the atmosphere.

All carbon dioxide isn't bad.

Without greenhouse gases, Earth's oceans would freeze and our planet wouldn't be able to support life.

It's been that way for millions of years.

But our way of life has increased how much carbon dioxide is produced.

There's many different sources of carbon dioxide.

So power plants, ethanol, plants, cement factories, other industrial facilities, when we have too much, then that heat blocking capacity is increased and you start to see increases in global temperatures, which then has an impact on climate over the long term.

Flash flooding in Decatur quickly covered roadways and left under passage with several inches of standing water.

Historic rainfall caused flooding in and around St. Louis, forcing first responders to rescue more than 100 people.

It was very scary, overwhelming, too much slow moving thunderstorms dumping record rains are becoming more common in Illinois, according to atmospheric scientists, like Deanna hints of the University of Illinois, one of the biggest ways that humans are contributing to this changing climate is through our carbon emissions.

And so this would be primarily through the burning of fossil fuels.

But there's also other aspects like how do we use the land how much of that is used for agriculture?

How is that turned over?

What kind of things do we add to the soil?

Some models are calling for a 150% increase in average rainfalls in central Illinois in just a few decades.

We may go longer periods of time without rain but didn't have huge downpours.

And that can have different impacts on agriculture, you know, and how much rain that a lot of our crops rely on.

Climate change is happening.

A United Nations report released in 2022 says the only way to stop the most dramatic changes is to act now.

In short, pretty much everything has to change because pretty much everything we do produces carbon dioxide.

It is possible says today's report, but time is almost out.

We've got to peak carbon emissions before 2025 says the UN and then cut them back by at least 43% By the end of 2030.

And then we need to take them all the way down to net zero by 2050.

It is a tall order, especially given that emissions are currently going up not down.

Illinois lawmakers passed an act to take most coal plants offline in the state by 2030.

Natural gas plants will follow by 2045 renewable energy like wind turbines dot the landscape.

But so far less than 10% of Illinois energy is produced by wind and solar.

There's something else that needs to be done.

And you have a geologist Sally Greenberg says Illinois is the perfect location.

I like to say that I am unbiased when I say this, but I'm a geologist so I'm probably not unbiased.

We have great rocks in Illinois, and we have really suitable geology for carbon storage.

Greenberg said the idea of storing carbon dioxide in Illinois works because Illinois, Indiana and Kentucky make up a geographical jackpot for underground storage.

Think of a seven layer salad where you have a casserole dish.

And you have different layers, you have peas, you have cheese you have you know, whatever else you put in your seven layer salad, and that's the sedimentary layers that make up what what we geologists think of as the stratigraphic column at the base of our stratigraphy in Illinois is a rock.

A rock that looks like this.

This is a core sample.

And this is a rock called the mount Simon sandstone.

And the mount Simon sandstone is beach sand, essentially, that has been over hundreds of millions of years turned into a rock.

Greenberg says Decatur Illinois, between Springfield and champagne sits on top of layers of rock formations that are more than a mile thick.

The sandstone at the very base is another 1500 feet thick.

So you're looking for a rock like the mount Simon sandstone, where you can store carbon dioxide.

And then you're looking for another kind of rock like a shale that sits above it that acts like a seal.

So a good way to think about this is if you if I'm to put a couple of drops of water on the sandstone because there's no water in the pore space, that's going to go into the rock and it's going to sit in those pore spaces.

And so that's what we do when we store carbon dioxide is that were liquefying it and we drill a well and through that, well we put the carbon dioxide into this rock as a storage container.

Concrete is one of the most widely used materials on Earth, but making it produces significant amounts of carbon.

Illinoisans are hard at work to change that.

I grew up in India.

So I did my bachelor's in civil engineering and my father worked in a construction company.

So I always was visiting the construction sites as I was growing up.

So it was kind of natural for me to get attracted to this field.

So my journey has been looking at various alternatives to cement because we know cement is a major contributor to co2 emissions.

I've always been interested in solving problems.

And when I started working in the field of civil engineering, especially with my master's, I realized this is a major issue on the sustainability of concrete.

And when I say state sustainability is you know, two ends.

One is, of course, the co2 emissions.

But also, whatever you build, it should be long lasting.

If you build something it doesn't last long, or it crumbles, I think that's not sustainable.

In my lab, we are doing quite a few different approaches to address this problem of low carbon cement.

So one of the most feasible approaches is you can think about co2 emissions in three different ways.

So the first one is you can avoid emissions.

The second is you can reduce emissions.

And the third is you can capture those emissions.

We have been very much focusing on the reducing emission side where what we're doing is now replacing cement because we know a lot of submissions are coming from coming from cement, if you can replace that with another material, which does not emit co2 during production.

That is a win win.

So if you think about materials like flashes, which come from coal power plants, Um, they don't, for example, unlike cement, they don't emit any co2 during the production.

But they're also a waste material, which is typically going to landfill.

So if you can use that in concrete, you reduce the emissions, but you also make concrete actually more sustainable material.

META is is, is building data centers rapidly as you know, the amount of data we are producing is increasing.

So all these big tech companies, that's a major footprint for them.

And what they are, what they were really interested in, and they're still are is to reduce the carbon footprint of the data center.

And I'm talking here, then all the components of the River Center.

And turns out concrete is a major component of that, because that's where that's what supports the entire structure.

So they came to us and said, if we could do something to design mixtures, using AI, which have low co2, and that's exactly what we did in the lab here.

And we were able to design a mix, which has almost 55% of SEM and 45% of cement.

And this was also done in partnership with Ozinga, which is a ready mix.

Partner.

And this was actually deployed last year.

So this was just how it came out.

To me, this is very difficult for humans to do, because we tend to either be too conservative, you know, we change one or two things and kind of get stuck in some unhappy situation.

Or we try to change too many things.

And then we don't get good results.

And in a way like this is perfectly suited for AI because AI is good at helping us understand the feasible space of concrete formulas, and also try to predict what the performance will be.

I think I'm fairly optimistic, because it's one of those problems that we have known existence a long time, and we are able to very much see the problem getting worse.

So I think in terms of and now, especially I would say in the past, in the past five to 10 years, or even the past five years things have really, really accelerated in terms of our offer transition.

So that makes me very optimistic.

Illinois is one of America's top coal producers, a byproduct of turning that fuel into energy has put some of our waterways in danger.

Kickapoo State Park in Eastern Illinois 2800 acres, an area nearly three times larger than New York's Central Park, breathtaking views and abundance of wildlife and the most green space per capita in the state of Illinois.

1000s of weekend campers as well as those who call it home depend on the groundwater from the Middle Fork of the Vermilion River.

But there's a threat upstream.

The power station operated from the late 50s until 2011.

And in that time was building up coal ash in these three large ponds.

So decades and decades of coal ash has built up.

Andrew rain is a water resource engineer with Prairie rivers network.

He, along with other activists have fought for the cleanup of coal ash ponds along the waterway.

This is a problem that's been building for years and years and years.

According to the state Geological Survey.

More than 7400 coal mines have operated in our state since the 1800s.

The industry employs 1000s of Illinoisans, but burning coal for electricity comes with consequences.

coal ash is the byproduct of burning coal.

Similar to a campfire where you burn you have ash down and you also have ash that flew up out of the campfire.

The US Energy Information Administration says coal is the leading source of carbon dioxide emissions related to electricity production.

When we prevent pollution from going into the air, it ends up in our coal ash waste stream.

And the treatment technology for coal ash for decades was to fill holes in the ground with that coal ash and just store it on site.

Power plants across Illinois have been across the country, just building up these coal ash ponds, acres large millions of cubic yards of coal ash at almost all of these sites.

So the Middle Fork is just one example where we have about 3.3 million cubic yards of coal ash.

Trying to put that into perspective, that's about like two and a half Empire State Buildings of coal ash, and this is typical at many sites across the state.

Rain and other river enthusiast say the threat of the coal ash contaminating the groundwater threatens the lifeblood of Kickapoo State Park.

So every time you go around a bend, you might see something different.

So there's floodplain forests there are they're a sandstone bluffs.

So if you're looking for birds and listening for birds, you can you can hear the woodpeckers you see the Kingfishers, you see their blood Wild turkeys we've seen wild turkeys on this river to Pam and land Richard are the founding members of the Eco justice collaborative, a volunteer environmental advocacy group.

They know the Middle Fork very well.

We'd canoed past the powerplant years before, totally oblivious to the issue, as most people probably were.

But when we learned of the major problem, and we had already moved into an activist mode in our own lives, we thought this is a place we need to sink in.

We visited the site for ourselves, and saw coal ash elements literally seeping into the banks of the river.

This river is very flashy, as they say, meaning when it rains, the water levels come up.

The erosion.

erosive forces are really strong.

And there was evidence that this was digging into the bank and eventually the embankment that was holding back the ash from the river could release all this material into the river just as it happened in Tennessee.

Just before Christmas 2008 a coal ash spill in Tennessee made national news.

People in Rowan County, Tennessee still aren't sure this evening just how bad a disaster they are facing after a coal ash spill that has covered neighborhoods and choked local rivers.

Millions of tons of ash and sludge came pouring out when a dike and a coal plant gave way this week.

One observer called it a witch's brew sludge from the Tennessee Valley authorities Kingston coal plant fouling 300 acres in eastern Tennessee, a spill much larger than first thought not 1.8 million cubic yards but 5.4 million, enough to fill more than 1300 Olympic sized swimming pools with potentially toxic sludge.

Pam and LAN are hoping to avoid a similar catastrophe in Eastern Illinois.

There were no laws broken.

That's what folks did you dump your stuff next to the river.

However, it became obvious that this material was seeping into the groundwater and actually moving into the to the river.

Environmentalists fear a heavy rain associated with our changing climate will erode the banks and 3 million cubic yards of coal ash.

Nearly half the amount in the Tennessee disaster will flood into the Middle Fork.

You can look in 2010 We then had an area eight feet of erosion in one year and another two feet in another year in another location.

Illinois power and Dynegy once owned the former coal plant in Vermillion County.

Current owner Texas based Vistra energy is now responsible for moving that coal ash and cleanup could take more than a decade.

In November of 2022 Vistra told us it was waiting for the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency to take action on a pending permit application.

A statement to Illinois public media reads in part, the proposed method of closure will take approximately 10 to 15 years to address the unique nature of the legacy plant site, be protective of the environment, attain all necessary Groundwater Protection standards, and importantly, achieved the shared priority of VISTA and community members to protect the meandering Middle Fork River near the site for the benefit of generations to come.

While the closure plan remains under ie pas review, the company routinely inspects and evaluates the erosion along the riverbank and routinely monitors and test the area through a network of 36 groundwater monitoring stations.

The analysis continues to show no evidence of any imminent threat to the integrity of the impoundments or off site groundwater impact.

VISTA also says its testing of the Middle Fork River shows no violation of US EPA drinking water standards and no adverse impacts on the rivers habitat or its users.

But river enthusiast fear time is running out.

As Illinois moves to diversify its energy portfolio with wind, solar and electric power.

The remnants of Illinois coal burning past will always be seen by those who hope to enjoy this park for generations to come.

To fight climate change industries are scrambling to reduce or offset their carbon emissions.

Dana Cronin shows us how Illinois farmers are leading that charge.

It's springtime on Jason Lay's farm in Bloomington, Illinois.

We're standing on one of his 75 acre fields, which during the growing season is covered with corn or soybeans.

But today the field is dotted with a grass light grain called Cereal Rye.

It's a cover crop which goes in during the winter months.

What that does because it helps hold the carbon dioxide or the greenhouse gases, it helps hold them so they don't get released out in to the atmosphere.

Instead of leaving his field alone in the winter lay uses the right to help fight climate change.

And the 75 acres of cover crops are keeping a lot of carbon out of the atmosphere, roughly would be about hopefully a ton an acre, so about 75 tons across this whole field.

That's equivalent to the emissions of 15 gas powered cars driven for one year.

Les is part of a growing number of farmers across the country starting to experiment with these cover crops thanks to something called the carbon marketplace.

I like to equate them to like the Wild West.

The marketplace works like this.

Let's say there's a company like a factory or manufacturer that needs to offset their carbon emissions because of self imposed goals or government regulations.

They can go to big corporate agriculture companies like Bayer, for example, and purchase carbon credits.

Bayer in turn pays farmers like Les to plant these carbon capturing cover crops which offset the company's emissions.

These carbon programs are popping up across the agriculture industry targeting everything from corn and soybean farms in the Midwest to cotton fields in the South.

I absolutely am a believer that carbon credits are part of the move to reduce the overall pressure on the atmosphere.

Chris harbor is Chief Strategy Officer at Indigo, a farming technology company.

Unlike older agriculture companies, Indigo focuses exclusively on sustainability.

Right now.

We can get every farmer on Earth to change their behavior if we incented it correctly, and they have the infrastructure, the equipment, they're already dispersed across the globe to make that happen immediately.

But Harper acknowledges scaling up would be difficult.

The US Department of Agriculture reports only 4% of farmland is planted with cover crops, and only a small fraction of those farms are enrolled in carbon programs.

To help bring more onboard Indigo offers farmers short five year contracts.

But some climate experts say it's going to take long term commitments to reduce the concentration of carbon in our atmosphere.

For the climate we really need, I would say durability of carbon stored on timescales of 100 years.

Gianna Amador is the co founder of carbon one ad, a nonprofit focused on carbon removal.

She argues when it comes to making a real dent in the climate crisis, we need to focus on how to reduce carbon overall, not just offset it.

But Amador says paying farmers to sequester carbon is ultimately a good thing.

What's exciting about these voluntary offset markets is it provides and incentives for farmers to shift practices and potentially helps with some of those financing challenges.

I mean, it's the obvious American answer you give me more and I'll figure out how to do it.

I'm Dana Cronin in Bloomington, Illinois.

According to the site co2, everything brewing, just one bottle of beer leaves behind the same amount of carbon as driving your car for about one mile.

For one vermillion county couple that was a challenge.

They wanted to brew their beer completely off the grid.

I would say some mornings you wake up and you're really excited because you walk 200 feet and start brewing beer.

And it's so cool like, because, you know, it's so easy just to be at work.

And in a sense, you never go to work, because I don't have to drive to a job.

So this building is just the cooking side of the brewing process.

So it's separated from the cellar where we ferment everything.

So we have a little three barrel brewing system in here.

And that's really all this building is for.

It's just cooking beer.

So we I kind of opened up all the windows, open everything up and brew beer in there.

If we would have just opened a brewery and a little city somewhere, that probably would have been a lot easier.

But it wouldn't have been as fun.

And then we would have had this finite thing to work with.

Whereas here like we have any vision pretty much any vision we have, like we can physically build it and watch it happen.

And that's really cool.

This is our fermentation cellar, and where all the beer gets bottled and keg.

So this is about eight feet underground.

We built it that way so it would hold temperature better for beer, because we don't use any glycol cooling chilling systems here.

So we have a small AC unit that runs off our solar that keeps to the cellar cool enough in the summertime.

But otherwise, we're relying on the temperature of the earth to help us maintain a good solid fermentation temperature in here.

So this is one of our battery banks, we have another battery bank for our other solar array.

But this one is all hybrid gel batteries, energy from the solar comes in and goes into these charge controllers and the charge controllers are going to say how much power the batteries need to stay fully charged.

And then after the batteries, the power is going to this inverter.

So that's going to convert the DC power from the panel's to AC household current.

And that then we distribute that power all over the farm.

This is the solar panel array that runs all of our brewery and our house, we have a separate one for the for the bars over there.

I do think when we moved out here, we started with about these four, maybe maybe these four panels.

And so we just keep adding to it every time you add to it makes life a little bit easier.

That's why we kind of have this Frankenstein set up and they all look a little bit different because we keep every time we add they we just get different brands and but this is a 10 kilowatt system.

It does feel good to think okay, this is probably sustainable.

And this is probably good for the environment.

We absolutely live off the grid.

Yeah, I mean, we're just factually, we're not connected, we don't have a camera and we don't have power lines.

So our whole place is not connected to the grid.

Think it started out because I started brewing beer.

I started home brewing.

But the reason I started home brewing right off was because I wanted to brew beer for a living.

We always knew we wanted to make a business out of that.

And so we got this land and it started out like hop farm and things we don't even do hops anymore.

It just keeps evolving to our tree bar is it's all running off solar.

Right now the food truck is 100 is all running off solar, the greenhouse bar we have coolers in there, that all runs off solar.

In the Brown Barn, we have our commercial refrigerators and freezers for the food truck and those are all running off solar.

And then the other side of the farm where the brewery and our houses that all runs off of a solar a separate solar array on that side also.

We want to build stuff and make stuff but really the only reason is so that people can eventually enjoy it.

Like we don't really want to build stuff just for us.

That's not very fun.

But we when we imagine people like here sitting at this tree bar drinking a beer and eating like some delicious tacos that's like what is this crazy experience like that's, that's what we're going for like we just always we built the place that we would want to hang out at that we would think was just so cool.

Scientists say you can lower your carbon footprint by turning off lights that you're not using an eating food that's locally grown.

We all have a role to play as Illinois continues to be in a state of change.

I'm Tinisha Spain thanks so much for watching.

Production funding for state of change is provided by the Backland Charitable Trust