In 2006, farmers around Richardton, North Dakota, got tired of a problem. They were trucking their corn out of the region to be processed, then buying the protein feed back to get their cattle through a North Dakota winter. So they built their own plant. More than 300 of them put the co-op together.
Twenty years on, the removals from that plant are part of Whirlpool Corporation’s carbon removal portfolio.
Whirlpool has secured durable carbon removal from Gevo North Dakota through ClimeFi, the portfolio manager it worked with to assemble a diversified set of suppliers. Gevo is one of four projects, alongside biochar, enhanced weathering and marine CDR. Projects including Gevo’s were chosen not just for their high carbon integrity, but because they also support rural and farming communities.
That is the news, but the real story is the ground it comes from.
A plant built by the people who supply it
Gevo North Dakota sits just off Interstate 94, outside a town of about 700 people. Gevo acquired the facility, then called Red Trail Energy, in January 2025.
The problem those farmers set out to solve has not changed shape. Corn still arrives from the fields around the plant. Every ton of ethanol the facility makes comes with roughly a ton of food and feed co-product, mostly distillers grains, stacked in a mountain out front and bound for cattle and, further down the chain, the pet food aisle. Some of the farmers who deliver the corn buy the feed back.
What that is worth, in numbers
- $86.43 million paid to local farmers for grain in 2025
- Around 23 million bushels of corn purchased each year
- 98% of 2025 corn grown within roughly 75 miles of the plant in 2025
- 46 employees as of 31 December 2025, every one of them living within 100 miles
- ~33% higher average hourly wage than the Stark County average
Growers drive their own corn to the plant, so commodity freight is not skimming value off what they keep per bushel. And much of that land is worked by families who have held it for generations, with farms in continuous crop production since the 1970s in most cases.
The third ton
Alongside the ton of ethanol and the ton of feed comes a third ton: biogenic CO2, released by the yeast as the corn ferments. For most of the plant’s life, it went straight back into the sky.
Now it does not. The CO2 is captured at the fermenters, cleaned to greater than 99.9% purity, compressed and moved by an on-property flowline to a Class VI injection well on the same 150-acre site. It goes 1.3 miles down into the Broom Creek Formation, a sandstone reservoir far below any drinking water aquifer, under a caprock seal. No CO2 leaves the facility boundary at any point, so there is no pipeline network and no transport risk to assess.
Puro.earth certifies the storage under its Geologically Stored Carbon methodology at 1,000+ years, its highest durability level. BeZero rates the project A. The facility has been delivering verified removals since June 2022 and has now surpassed 700,000 issued removal certificates. North Dakota holds Class VI primacy, and injection volumes are reported to the state regulator.
Why it matters beyond one purchase
Durable carbon removal is often pictured as something built new, somewhere remote, by people with no prior claim on the place. Gevo North Dakota is the other kind. The farmers were there first. The plant they built came next. The carbon capture was added to a working piece of a local economy, not dropped on top of one.
When a company like Whirlpool partners with ClimeFi, runs diligence and lands in a town of about 700 people, it says something about where carbon removal capacity sits in the United States, and about who climate finance is supporting.
As Samantha Truesdell, Whirlpool enterprise sustainability manager said, “We are thrilled to be able to support projects that share our core values and ambition to improve life across communities where we do business around the world.”
Our thanks to Whirlpool Corporation and to ClimeFi.