It was the first meeting since she and the rest of her central Illinois community learned of a second leak at ADM’s carbon dioxide sequestration well beneath Lake Decatur, their primary source of drinking water.

My first thought: “Ah well, at least the local residents will get free sparkling water on tap, right?”

However, there is concern that pumping CO2 into saline reservoirs near subsurface water risks pushing pressurized CO2 and brine toward those resources, which would pose additional contamination risks. “Brine is pretty nasty stuff,” said Dominic Diguilio, a retired geoscientist from the EPA Office of Research and Development. “It has a very high concentration of salts, heavy metals, sometimes volatile organic compounds and radionuclides like radium.”

Oh. That is significantly less fun.