Scrub Hub: Indiana's top greenhouse gas emitters for 2022 are power plants, steelmakers.

It’s that time of year, where we look forward to the next year but also reflect on the past. That’s exactly what we are going to do with this Scrub Hub: We are going to look back at where Indiana’s emissions that are most harmful to the climate have come from.

You may have remembered my Scrub Hub from just over a year ago that looked at how Indiana stacks up when it comes to emissions across the U.S.. — it wasn’t good. As a state, we were one of just 10 that emitted nearly half of the country’s carbon.

As a whole, Indiana emitted nearly 185 million metric tons of greenhouse gasses, or those that contribute to climate change, in 2020. That’s the most recent data available across all sectors.

For this year-end edition of the Scrub Hub, however, we are looking internally at where those emissions are coming from? We are answering the question: Who within Indiana are the state’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gasses, including carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and others?

It may come as no surprise, but it’s a lot of industry – particularly the power and manufacturing sectors. But just how much are they putting out there?

To answer these questions, we spoke with an expert and delved into the data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Here’s what we found out.

Short Answer: Industry the main culprit. 

When accounting for all greenhouse gas emissions in Indiana, the three main sectors from biggest to smallest are electric power production, industry and transportation.

Being the crossroads of America, transportation makes up a good chunk of Indiana’s emissions. Still, it accounts for only about 20% of the state’s total greenhouse gas releases in 2020. Power and industry, on the other hand, together make up more than 60% of those emissions across Indiana.

When looking at greenhouse gasses that are released from major facilities across the state, those two sectors have an even larger presence. More than three-quarters of Indiana’s facility emissions come from power production and from industry, particularly steel.

According to the most recent EPA data available, which was updated in August of this year, 199 Indiana facilities emitted 120.7 million metric tons of carbon dioxide and various greenhouse gasses in 2021. Seventy of those tons, or 57%, are from the power industry and an additional 31 million tons, or 25%, are from the metals industry.

In Indiana, metals mean steel.

Indiana’s biggest emitter in 2021 — releasing 10.3 million tons of greenhouse gasses — is the US Steel Corps plant in Gary. That facility’s emissions have gone up significantly in the last year as the company announced it was increasing production.

US Steel ousted the previous top emitter: Duke Energy’s Gibson coal power plant, which now holds the number two spot.

Other major greenhouse gas-releasing facilities include AES Indiana’s Petersburg coal plant, two Cleveland Cliffs’ steel plants in northern Indiana, and other coal power plants around the state. Of the top 10 biggest emitters, nine of them are either power plants or steelmakers. The only that is not, in the tenth spot, is BP’s oil refinery along Lake Michigan.

Long Answer: Long-term trends of decline

Despite these big emissions numbers, Indiana has seen some overall decreases across the state overtime. Between 1990 and 2020, the state’s total emissions have gone down nearly 22% — with big drops coming from the power and industrial sectors.

But the story is not quite that simple, according to Gabe Filippelli, the executive director of Indiana’s Environmental Resilience Institute.

“This is a little hard to look at as an accurate depiction because it stops in 2020,” he said, “and that was a really strange and unusual year because of the pandemic and emissions have gone back up this year.”

If looking at emissions up until 2019 instead, the decrease is only half that number — emissions drop by just 11% instead. And greenhouse gas releases across the country have been ticking back up in the last two years as society begins returning to pre-pandemic operations.

For example, when looking at the EPA facility-specific emissions data, which is available through 2021, a different story begins to emerge.

In 2020, more facilities released fewer emissions: 111.7 million metric tons across 202 sites. Just one year later, in 2021, less than 200 facilities emitted 10 million more metric tons of greenhouse gasses across the state.

At the same time, carbon sinks — or those landscapes that absorb more carbon dioxide than they release, such as forests — across Indiana have gone down close to 12% in two decades. That’s a number experts don’t want to see going down.

The EPA released these updated resources on greenhouse gas emissions data in the last year, including new state-level data for the whole country and U.S. territories.

These resources include a state-by-state emissions inventory and updates to the searchable tool as well as information on opportunities to reduce emissions at the state-level. In its release of the inventory, the EPA said it hopes states will use the new data and tools to help cut back on greenhouse gasses.

The state of Indiana, however, has failed to take some key steps on emissions and climate change. During the 2022 legislative session, lawmakers did not even hear or consider two pieces of legislation on the topic. One was a resolution that acknowledged climate change even exists, and the other was a bill that would create a task force to look at climate change issues in Indiana. Neither even got a hearing.

Much of the reductions Indiana has seen comes from utilities retiring some of their coal plants. Those drops will continue to happen as more coal power production goes offline — more than a handful of such plants are slated to retire by the end of the decade.

Duke’s Gibson plant, however, the state’s second biggest emitter, is not slated to fully retire until 2035. That will likely make it the largest coal plant still operating in the state at that time.

A lot of what is replacing coal power is natural gas — which releases less carbon dioxide but more methane throughout the lifestyle of the fossil fuel from drilling to burning. More renewables are also coming online, which have no emissions once up and running.

“The nice thing is that our emissions have gone down and are heading in the right direction,” Filippelli said. “And it will continue going down, because the power plant emissions will keep declining. That leaves transportation, which is also relatively easy to replace as we go more electric.”

“Then that leaves the metals,” he added, “which is a bit more challenging.”

Reducing emissions on the steelmaking side of things is tricky. That process takes a lot of heat and a source that is continuously operating, which is more difficult for renewables to provide. So it will take future conversations about other potential power source options for the steel industry, Filippelli said.

These changes aren’t going to happen tomorrow, he said, but they are coming.

If you have more questions about emissions, reduction efforts, or any other topics, let us know! You can ask us by submitting a question through our Google form below. Can’t see the form? Click here.

Call IndyStar reporter Sarah Bowman at 317-444-6129 or email at sarah.bowman@indystar.com. Follow her on Twitter and Facebook: @IndyStarSarah. Connect with IndyStar’s environmental reporters: Join The Scrub on Facebook.

IndyStar's environmental reporting project is made possible through the generous support of the nonprofit Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Indiana's top carbon emitters are power plants and steelmakers