It was a “Spill the Tea Party” in downtown Springfield Saturday, as Whimsy Tea offered free drinks and hosted community groups opposing a CO2 pipeline that would be built beneath us in Central Illinois.
A final decision on the pipeline, which would move highly pressurized liquid CO2, is about eleven months away.
Nick Dodson of the Sierra Club says you can’t trust what lobbyists tell you about CO2 being safe.
Likewise, Dodson says, it’s a bad deal for farmers, underneath whose land the CO2 would run. “When you compare it to green energy like solar and wind farms, those farmers get a constant returning dividend. This is a one-time payment and done.” What would not go away would be the risk of a pipeline rupture. “All pipelines rupture,” Dodson says. “It’s not a question of if but when and where.”
“The thing with this that’s really dangerous,” Dodson says, “is when one of these explodes, it unzips, so it literally makes the pipe look like a zipper has gone all the way down it and it all exudes at once, and then it’s a dispersion model of up to a mile and a half.”
Dodson points to the February 2020 CO2 pipeline rupture in Satartia, Mississippi that left a forty-foot crater, spread a mile and a half, sent forty-nine people to the hospital and caused thirty folks to have to evacuate.
To learn more about the coalition, visit noillinoisco2pipelines.org.