EJC appeals final Marquis Class VI Permit
On April 10, 2026, EPA Region 5 issued the first Class VI underground injection control permit in Illinois, authorizing Marquis Carbon Sequestration, LLC to inject 9 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the Mt. Simon Sandstone beneath Putnam County over six years. This is the first Class VI well permit issued since Archer Daniels Midland's two projects, and is the largest single Class VI project in the Illinois Basin to date. The injection site sits just 1.25 miles from WPL-1, a closed Class I hazardous-waste well that received 276 million gallons of acidic steelmaking waste between the 1960s and 2009. That waste remains in the formation today.
On May 7, 2026, Eco-Justice Collaborative petitioned the EPA Environmental Appeals Board to review the permit. The petition was prepared by Dr. Lindsey Gulden, PhD, Leg Up Data and Pam Richart, Co-Director, Eco-Justice Collaborative. Our petition raises eleven issues — modeling defects, monitoring and well-integrity shortfalls, under-analyzed seismic risk, an unexamined interaction with the hazardous-waste plume, a confining-zone determination at odds with the published geology, and public-process failures — and asks the Board to stay or vacate the permit and remand it to Region 5 for corrective action.
The full petition is technical. To make the issues accessible to anyone with a stake in the outcome — residents, journalists, elected officials, and other communities facing similar projects — we have prepared a plain-language slide summary of all eleven issues. Each slide identifies the defect, explains what the regulation requires, and points to the evidence Region 5 disregarded.
