America's Carbon Storage Map Is Being Redrawn

The U.S. carbon storage landscape is being reshaped right now, permit by permit. Texas gained full state-level authority over carbon storage well permitting in December 2025. Indiana's first construction-ready CCS project landed its EPA permit in April 2026. Both milestones signal that commercial-scale carbon capture and storage is spreading inland, opening new economic options for mid-continent emitters who had limited access to shared CCS infrastructure before.

What Did Texas's Class VI Primacy Actually Change?

Texas receiving Class VI primacy from the EPA on November 12, 2025 is the biggest single shift in U.S. carbon storage permitting in years. The Railroad Commission of Texas (RRC), the state agency that already regulates oil and gas operations statewide, now holds full authority to issue permits for CO2 injection wells used for permanent geologic sequestration. Projects no longer need both a state and a separate federal authorization. A single RRC-issued Class VI permit now covers the entire permitting process.

That change removes a genuine obstacle. The EPA had issued only 11 final Class VI permits since the program launched in 2011, as of August 2025, even as hundreds of applications piled up nationally. Texas alone accounted for 64 of the 239 applications pending at EPA as of September 2025, the largest state-level backlog in the country. With the RRC now running its own program, that backlog can start moving. The RRC had 18 applications under active review when primacy took effect and has targeted issuing roughly 25 Class VI permits within its first two years.

States with primacy have a consistent record of processing permits faster than the federal agency. North Dakota, which received Class VI primacy in 2018, issued its first approval in roughly eight months from submission. Wyoming, which gained primacy in 2020, approves wells in under a year, compared to 24 months or longer under EPA-only review. North Dakota has issued eight permits and Wyoming has issued nine, all operational or under construction. That combined total of 17 state-issued permits stands against the 11 EPA-issued permits accumulated over 14 years of federal administration.

>> RELATED: The Gulf Is Ready to Store Carbon. Washington Just Needs to Move.

How Is Texas Positioned to Lead U.S. Carbon Storage?

Texas does not just have permitting authority now. It has the geology, the infrastructure, and the workforce to use it at scale. Gulf Coast saline formations are among the most thoroughly characterized CO2 storage reservoirs in North America. Existing pipelines, compression equipment, and industrial corridors give CCS developers in Texas a head start that most other states cannot match.

A September 2024 economic impact study by the Texas Association of Business, conducted by Angelou Economics, analyzed four CCUS project scenarios across 12 Texas counties. The study found an average state-level economic impact of $1.8 billion, with roughly 7,500 full-time jobs created or supported at an average hourly wage of $45. Local tax revenues from construction and operations were projected to increase by $33.4 million across the study counties.

Those projections cover just 12 counties. The full Gulf Coast industrial corridor, running from Houston through Port Arthur and into Louisiana, contains some of the highest concentrations of industrial CO2 emitters on the continent. Major CCS hubs in the region, including the Bayou Bend project in Southeast Texas, are now operating under a single permitting authority for the first time. That simplifies project timelines and reduces legal exposure for developers who previously managed parallel state and federal review tracks simultaneously.

State	Primacy Year	Permits Issued	Status Notes
North Dakota	2018	8	All operational; first approved in ~8 months
Wyoming	2020	9	Under construction; approvals in under 1 year
Louisiana	2023	1 (Hackberry, Sept. 2025)	Moratorium on new applications since Oct. 2025
West Virginia	Feb. 2025	0 issued yet	Reviewing first wave of applications
Arizona	Sept. 2025	0 issued yet	No pending applications inherited from EPA
Texas	Dec. 2025 (effective)	18 under review at RRC	Largest inherited backlog of any primacy state

Why Does Indiana's First Construction-Ready CCS Permit Matter Beyond Indiana?

On April 9, 2026, Vault 44.01 Ltd., a Denver-based CCS project developer backed by private equity firm Grey Rock Investment Partners, announced that EPA Region 5 had issued a final Class VI permit for the One Carbon Partnership CCS project near Union City, Indiana. The joint venture partner is Cardinal Ethanol, an Indiana-based producer whose facility generates approximately 400,000 metric tons of CO2 per year as a by-product of corn fermentation.

The permit authorizes Vault and Cardinal to construct injection infrastructure, capture CO2 from Cardinal's existing ethanol production process, and inject it into deep geologic formations for permanent storage. Once operational, the project will store up to 450,000 metric tons of CO2 annually. Pore space secured at the site can hold approximately 13.5 million metric tons over 30 years. The capital investment totals more than $60 million in Randolph County, Indiana, supporting more than 30 local construction jobs and providing corn growers in the area with access to the growing low-carbon ethanol market.

The significance goes beyond Indiana. The state sits above a large portion of the Mt. Simon Sandstone, one of the deepest and most viable saline storage formations in North America. That formation extends across Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and parts of Ohio. Researchers at the Indiana Geological and Water Survey have described Indiana as having "high potential as a candidate for CCS projects," citing both the availability of industrial CO2 sources and the presence of multiple storage-ready geologic formations.

Vault 44.01 currently has a pipeline of more than 10 CCS projects across five states, focused on near-site sequestration at ethanol facilities and other industrial emitters. The Indiana permit demonstrates that EPA Region 5 can issue final Class VI approvals for mid-continent projects, not just Gulf Coast ones. That matters for the dozens of developers evaluating similar sites across the Corn Belt.

What Does This Mean for Mid-Continent Emitters?

For years, the economics of CCS development strongly favored companies with direct access to Gulf Coast storage hubs. Mid-continent emitters in states like Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, and Missouri faced harder choices. They either needed expensive CO2 pipeline networks to move captured emissions to coastal storage sites, or they waited for local options that were not yet available.

That equation is changing. Near-site sequestration projects like Vault's Indiana facility eliminate the pipeline dependency entirely. CO2 captured at Cardinal's ethanol plant is injected into geology directly beneath the site. Ethanol fermentation produces a concentrated, relatively pure CO2 stream, which makes capture equipment simpler and less expensive than post-combustion sources like power plants or cement kilns. The project avoids the pore space access, pipeline rights-of-way, and multi-state regulatory coordination that longer-haul CCS models require.

The federal 45Q tax credit strengthens the business case. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law on July 4, 2025, the 45Q credit was maintained at a maximum of $85 per metric ton of CO2 permanently sequestered for industrial and power source projects meeting prevailing wage and apprenticeship requirements. The credit remains transferable, which lets developers sell credits to investors if they lack sufficient tax liability, a provision that benefits first-of-kind and smaller-scale projects like the One Carbon Partnership particularly.

Where the U.S. Carbon Storage Map Goes Next

The permit-by-permit expansion of U.S. carbon storage is gaining real momentum at both ends of the country's industrial map. Texas is managing the largest state-level Class VI backlog ever handed to a single state regulator. Indiana has demonstrated that the Midwest can issue a final Class VI permit and move a project to construction, without waiting for Gulf Coast infrastructure to reach inland. As of August 2025, the EPA had issued only 11 total Class VI permits nationwide since 2011. That number is now growing through state programs and EPA regional offices alike.

Other states are moving. Alabama is in early stages of its Class VI primacy application. Illinois is seeing active Class VI work, including the Vault 44.01 Mt. Simon-linked projects and the recently approved Marquis Carbon Injection project in Putnam County, which can store up to nine million metric tons of CO2 over six years. California's Carbon TerraVault I project broke ground in Kern County in October 2025, with first injection planned for early 2026.

The combined effect of state primacy expansion and inland permit approvals is a U.S. storage map that looks fundamentally different from what existed 18 months ago. Gulf Coast dominance in geologic storage is not going away. The scale and geology there remain unmatched. But it no longer has to be the only answer for industrial emitters pursuing permanent underground carbon storage.

For mid-continent facilities, that shift changes both the cost structure and the timeline of CCS development. Projects once blocked by federal permitting delays or pipeline economics now have a clearer, more direct path. One Class VI permit at a time, the geography of American carbon storage keeps getting bigger.