Honeywell Gives a Shuttered Indiana Plant Its Second Life

A gasification facility that went dark in 2016 is about to become one of the most ambitious carbon capture and clean ammonia projects in American history. Wabash Valley Resources (WVR), backed by a $1.559 billion DOE loan and licensed syngas treating technology from Honeywell Process Technology, will restart the West Terre Haute, Indiana plant to produce 500,000 metric tons of anhydrous ammonia annually by 2028. This is what it looks like when CCS stops being a retrofit idea and becomes an industrial revival tool.

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What Happens When You Combine CCS with a Dormant Industrial Asset?

The short answer: you get a facility that serves two urgent national needs at once. The West Terre Haute plant will produce domestic fertilizer for Corn Belt farmers while permanently storing carbon dioxide underground. That combination is what makes this project different from a standard CCS deployment.

Most carbon capture projects are grafted onto existing, active operations. This one is rebuilding from scratch, using an idle coal gasification plant as the foundation. The facility has been dormant since 2016. By the time it restarts, it will capture and store approximately 1.65 million metric tons of CO2 annually, injected a mile below the earth's surface into geological formations. The EPA permit for the injection wells allows up to 1.67 million metric tons per year.

That is not a pilot. That is one of the largest carbon sequestration installations in the country.

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How Is Honeywell's Technology Being Used Here?

Honeywell is not supplying carbon capture in the conventional post-combustion sense. What Honeywell Process Technology is providing is licensed UOP technology for syngas treating, the critical step that processes raw synthesis gas from the gasification unit into a usable feedstream for the ammonia facility.

That technology package includes three integrated components. The Ortloff CO₂ Fractionation unit removes approximately 80 percent of the CO₂ from the syngas stream, producing a high-purity liquid CO₂ stream ready for pressurization and geological storage. The Polybed™ Pressure Swing Adsorption (PSA) unit handles the remaining CO₂ and purifies the hydrogen-rich stream. The MOLSIV™ Molecular Sieve dehydration unit processes the gas ahead of those steps. All three components are fully modularized, along with interconnecting piperacks and piping, which reduces construction time and on-site complexity.

The CO₂ captured through this process is sent for permanent underground storage. SAMSUNG E&A is leading overall facility design and has previously collaborated with Honeywell on jointly marketing Honeywell's Advanced Solvent Carbon Capture (ASCC) technology, though the WVR project uses the UOP syngas treating package described above.

The Wabash Valley project represents a complex application of this technology stack: bringing it online inside a plant being restarted after nearly a decade offline.

Why Does It Matter That This Plant Was Shut Down?

The "second life" angle is the part most coverage has missed. The gasification facility in West Terre Haute sat idle for nearly a decade. Coal communities like this one saw those shutdowns as permanent losses: jobs, tax base, and regional identity tied to industrial infrastructure that simply stopped operating.

WVR is restarting and modernizing that same plant, not building on a greenfield site. That decision has real implications for how America thinks about stranded industrial assets. There are hundreds of shuttered facilities across the Midwest with existing infrastructure, experienced local workforces, and geological characteristics suited for carbon storage. This project shows they do not have to stay shuttered.

The DOE loan is $1.559 billion toward a total project investment of $2.6 billion. That capital is flowing into West Terre Haute, Indiana, into a region that lost its major industrial employer in 2016. The project is expected to create hundreds of union construction jobs and 125 permanent positions once fully operational, according to WVR's project disclosures.

Milestone	Timeline	Detail
EPA Well Permits Issued	January 2024	Construction permits for two underground CO2 injection wells in Vigo and Vermillion Counties
DOE Conditional Commitment	September 2024	$1.559 billion loan guarantee announced as part of $2.4B total investment at time of announcement
DOE Loan Closed; Honeywell Partnership Announced	October 2025	Loan finalized; total project investment updated to $2.6 billion
Groundbreaking	January 5, 2026	Construction began on modernized gasification plant
Full Commercial Operations	2028	500,000 metric tons of ammonia per year; approximately 1.65 million metric tons of CO2 stored annually

What Does This Mean for American Farmers?

Anhydrous ammonia is the backbone of U.S. fertilizer supply. American agriculture currently imports ammonia from Canada, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and Russia. That dependency creates price volatility and supply chain risk for farmers across the Eastern Corn Belt, which relies on approximately one million metric tons of ammonia annually.

WVR's West Terre Haute facility will be the first domestically produced low-carbon ammonia source located in the Corn Belt. At 500,000 metric tons per year at full capacity, the plant is projected to displace roughly half of the Eastern Corn Belt's ammonia import volume. WVR aims to apply direct downward pressure on fertilizer costs for Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and surrounding state farmers by producing that supply closer to where it is needed.

The broader low-carbon ammonia market is accelerating, with major projects in Louisiana and elsewhere competing for this opportunity. WVR's geographic position inside the Corn Belt, close to end users, gives it a logistics advantage over Gulf Coast producers.

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Who Else Is Involved?

This project assembled a broad coalition of technology and finance partners across nearly a decade of development.

• Honeywell Process Technology (Charlotte, NC) is providing licensed UOP technology for syngas treating, including CO₂ Fractionation, Pressure Swing Adsorption (PSA), and Molecular Sieve units.
• SAMSUNG E&A (global engineering firm) is leading overall facility design. Samsung E&A and Honeywell have previously collaborated on jointly marketing Honeywell's ASCC technology, though the WVR project uses the UOP syngas treating package.
• Baker Hughes (Houston, TX) is providing compression systems, injection well construction, and CarbonEdge monitoring and verification services for CO2 sequestration. This is the first deployment of CarbonEdge on a project of this scale.
• Casale SA (Switzerland) is supplying its proprietary N-LOOP ammonia synthesis technology, designed to produce 1,630 tonnes of ammonia per day.
• Climate Investment, a decarbonization fund founded by eleven major global energy companies, was an early backer of WVR's carbon capture program.
• South Korean investors Hanwha Asset Management and Korea Investment Real Asset Management have also committed capital, with the Korean government involved in supporting the partnership.

How Does This Fit Into the Broader CCS Picture?

The U.S. carbon capture sector now counts more than 270 publicly announced projects, representing $77.5 billion in capital investment, according to the Carbon Capture Coalition. Most are still in development. The Wabash Valley project is one of the few moving from loan commitment to active construction.

It also represents a specific and underused model: pairing CCS with existing idle infrastructure rather than greenfield builds. That approach changes the economics substantially. Geological surveys, existing site permits, and physical plant infrastructure are already in place. Projects like AtmosClear in Louisiana and the broader U.S. CCS buildout are pursuing sequestration through new-build facilities. Wabash Valley Resources is demonstrating a different path.

The industrial decarbonization challenge needs both approaches. But the "second life" model, if it works in Indiana, could become a template for stranded assets across the country. There are no shortage of dormant industrial sites that might follow the same playbook.

The Numbers That Tell the Story

By 2028, the West Terre Haute plant will store approximately 1.65 million metric tons of CO2 annually while feeding 500,000 metric tons of clean ammonia into the Eastern Corn Belt's supply chain each year. The $2.6 billion total investment is flowing into a community that had been waiting nearly a decade for its industrial base to come back online.

That double outcome, emissions removed and domestic food security strengthened, is the model the Honeywell and WVR partnership is built around. And it is the reason the combination of carbon capture and shuttered industrial assets deserves far more attention than it has received.

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