Push to build more CO2 pipelines and store vast amounts of the gas underground in Illinois raises alarms about safety regulations

For years, the carbon dioxide pipeline snaked through the fields and forests of Yazoo County, Mississippi, going largely unnoticed.

But that changed forever on a winter evening in 2020.

Under pressure from heavy rains and a landslide, the pipeline split in two, roaring like a jet engine, carving a 40-foot crater into the ground, and sending an invisible cloud of dangerous carbon dioxide vapor toward the tiny village of Satartia.

In a scene rescue workers would later compare to a zombie movie, cars died in the middle of the road, their engines starved of oxygen. Drivers fled, leaving their hazard lights blinking in the dust and darkness.

A sheriff’s deputy working without an oxygen mask grew increasingly unsteady and short of breath, until he himself had to be rescued, according to Warren County fire coordinator Jerry Briggs.

Closer to the deafening roar of the escaping gas, Briggs and his team spotted a stalled-out car that was still in drive, the driver’s foot resting on the brake, the windows closed. All three of the men inside were unconscious.

“It was miraculous that they survived,” Briggs said.

While rare and up until now nonfatal, accidents such as the one that night in Satartia loom large as the Midwest considers the health and safety issues raised by proposals to build massive new carbon dioxide pipeline projects, including Omaha-based Navigator CO2′s 1,350-mile network spanning Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska and South Dakota.

The projects aim to prevent planet-warming CO2 from entering the atmosphere by capturing it during industrial processes, compressing it into a fluid, transporting it in steel pipelines and injecting it deep underground into naturally occurring rock formations where it will be trapped — ideally for thousands of years.

Navigator says this can be done safely and points to thousands of miles of CO2 pipeline already in use in the United States, mostly by the oil industry, which uses carbon dioxide to boost production.

But opponents, including environmentalists