Carbon Capture and Storage: Industry Connections and Community Impacts

If family farmers along the routes of either of these proposals think they will have a seat at the table, they need look no further than Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds’ Economic Recovery Advisory Board which recommended that the governor, by way of an executive order, establish a Carbon Sequestration Task Force. The governor signed the executive order on June 22 of last year, but as University of Iowa professor Colin Gordon pointed out, the ERAB is populated by “nine CEOs or business owners, one corporate counsel, one Chamber of Commerce vice-president, one corporate board member, and one factory manager.” 

So far, Rastetter and Reynold’s Summit proposal has prompted nearly 900 public comments to the Iowa Utilities Board which has been charged with the permitting of pipelines and Reuters found that nearly 99% were in opposition to the project. Similarly, at an Iowa Public Utilities Board public meeting in January on the Greenway project the company and the state left the audience wanting with respect to questions on whether a full carbon budget had been done, whether the pipeline could burst, and whether the state would invoke imminent domain to facilitate the pipeline’s construction. Food & Water Watch organizer and Iowa resident Emma Schmit summed the skepticism up best: “We’re really just seeing big businesses working together to keep these industries that are on their deathbeds alive…People on the ground see it for what it is: a lie.” 

In contrast to the lack of pipeline resistance we’ve seen in Appalachia and Northern Ohio, Jessica Wiskus, one of the primary players in the resistance to CCS CO2 pipelines, made it clear that Summit resistance is coming from farmers of all ages because of their concerns about what would happen to their beloved soils, a land ethic that is not just about this year’s crop, and maybe most importantly due to the fact that, unlike other largely agrarian places where pipelines have been sited, the family farm is alive and well in Eastern Iowa:

“Here it is viable for the next generation to pick up farming because we have the best soils in the country. Sons who are looking to learn and take over the farm and go to Iowa State to get an agricultural degree.”

I can’t help but wonder what residents of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe think when they see white farmers in Iowa and both Dakotas, rightly, get their hackles up about private property rights and eminent domain, but yet when the Standing Rock Tribe was fighting the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) in the face of massive private security and county law enforcement, many who talk the loudest about private property rights were nowhere to be found. In an op-ed written by Wiskus in support of SF 2160 introduced by state Senator Jeff Taylor (See Table 2 below for a summary of relevant legal fights and legislation) this past February, she summed up why eminent domain for CO2 pipelines was necessary and inevitable even if the industry wasn’t willing to say it out loud:

“The pipelines aren’t necessary for ethanol—they’re only “necessary” in the eyes of Bruce Rastetter (CEO of Summit Agricultural Group) and Joe Gorder (CEO of Valero) because these men decided to invest in carbon capture instead of reducing ethanol’s CO2 emissions at the source (like ADM and POET). That’s a business decision, not a public good, and these businessmen know that their success depends upon the use of eminent domain to take land away from Iowa’s rural citizens.”

Unfortunately, SF 2160 was killed by Republican State Senator Jason Schultz “without a single word of explanation,” even though some of the country’s largest ethanol producers like ADM and Poet supported the bill, with ADM currently working with the Illinois State Geological Survey to inject its own CO2 into a massive sandstone formation at a rate of roughly 405,000 metric tons of CO2 per year without the need for massive pipeline networks. 

However, even ADM appears like it will need eminent domain as it ponders a 260-350-mile pipeline to move 12 million metrics tons of CO2 from its Cedar Rapids and Clinton, Iowa refineries that collectively produce nearly 800 million gallons of ethanol, to its Decatur, Illinois, operations where their currently sequestering CO2. As Ms. Wiskus told me by phone, representatives in Des Moines “passed bills that required a minimum threshold for the triggering of eminent domain. It was not just 20% of landowners that triggered eminent domain… but right now it is up to three people on the Iowa Public Utilities Board to decide what will or will not trigger eminent domain versus above-ground utilities where the landowners get together to decide if this is in the public good. That process is in law already. The fact that someone would say it is legal does not mean there is not a moral requirement. There is a loophole for just the pipelines in addition to the moral outrage. It is for a private corporation, not the public good!”

To Ms. Wiskus’ point McPherson County, South Dakota Commissioner Anthony Kunz in defending his county’s  moratorium on “hazardous liquid transmission pipelines” said the quiet part out loud that Summit Carbon Solutions wasn’t willing to say in open setting with respect to the use of eminent domain:

“If you read between the lines, I think that’s probably an option for them. They say they don’t want to, but they also don’t tell you that they won’t.”

InForum columnist and “Child of the Prairie” North Dakota resident Tony Bender said of eminent domain:

“During a recent meeting in Wishek, North Dakota, Summit representatives treated landowners like rubes. Gosh, when it came to the issue of eminent domain, they didn’t want to talk about that possibility. They don’t want to talk about landowner liability, either, because the landowners’ insurers don’t want to touch this with a 10-foot pole.”

The historical reliance of Big Oil & Gas and now Big Ag and Fertilizer by way of their relationship with the former on 1) eminent domain, 2) inflated benefit estimates, 3) pitting neighbor against neighbor, 4) dismissing the original rights provided to indigenous communities in the Fort Laramie Treaty, and 5) an inability to bring themselves to even mention potential environmental and health costs, flies directly in the face of the Biden administration’s Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) “guidance to Federal agencies to help ensure that the advancement of Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Sequestration (CCUS) technologies is done in a responsible manner that incorporates the input of communities and reflects the best available science.” Whether there are any teeth to this guidance, or it is merely window dressing is yet to be determined, but as the current president once said at a Vice Presidential debate in 2008, the “Past is Prologue”. 

Many of the comments in opposition to the Midwest CCS CO2 pipeline proposals would ring familiar to anyone that has followed the permitting of interstate natural gas and oil transmission pipelines like the NEXUS here in Ohio, or the numerous incidents reported to the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA). Nowhere are the similarities between frontline sentiment and the ways in which elected officials and industry package these projects more obvious than in what Ms. Wiskus, now running in Iowa State Senate’s District 42 election in November, told me when I asked her about the similarities between fracking and CCS:

“This was promoted as something that would revitalize rural communities just like fracking! When I got materials in the mail from the company with very little forewarning or information on safety there was something about the materials that led me to think there must be something more to the story. This skepticism was due to my experience in Pennsylvania. All these CCS proposals are for EOR and that is beyond a doubt! They say they are going to separate the topsoil but what we so with DAPL made us question that statement even though there is a law here in Iowa that demands this be done. They placed the topsoil within the temporary expanded ROW, and they used that to drive their equipment along during construction. You can’t fix it cause it’s like Humpty Dumpty. It’s also about the small family farmer and we know all the farmers in my area…[and] what everyone’s family has sacrificed for generations…When you farm there is something you are part of that is greater than you at work every single year and you can’t just hand that over to a private corporation because they don’t understand it. There’s nothing more offensive than these private corporations saying, “I need your land for my profit” and political differences are eliminated, and this provides the strength to say “I don’t care what you are offering me!’”

South Dakota organic farmer Charlie Johnson concurred with Ms. Wiskus when he told South Dakota News Watch that he opposes the Summit for the same reasons he opposed the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) that went through his land, stating, “What we’re doing is creating stress and anxiety for thousands of landowners, we’re tearing up the land, we’re investing billions of dollars that could be invested better…Let’s get back to simpler approaches; let’s get back to capturing carbon by using nature itself.”

It is important to note that, unlike oil and gas, the carbon dioxide that is transported in pipelines is moved in a “supercritical” state somewhere between a liquid and a gas and if it isn’t kept under constant and consistent pressure, it can “unzip” pipelines which may have been what happened in Satartia, Mississippi. 

It was just two years ago that a CO2 pipeline operated by Denbury Inc., then known as Denbury Resources, in Satartia ruptured leaving 250 largely African-American evacuees and dozens sick, with PHMSA only just now having released its findings on the incident. This pipeline pulls CO2 from an extinct volcano beneath Jackson, 40 miles to the southeast of Sataria, for what CO2 has heretofore usually been used for a process called enhanced oil recovery (EOR) which relies on brine or CO2 injected at high pressures and volumes to repressurize spent oil fields from Northern Michigan to California, Mississippi, and all points in between. Satartia is not unique in the sense that much of the existing and proposed infrastructure that will be critical for the viability of CCS will be sited in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color like Southwest Detroit, St. James Parish, and Pittsburgh, with one of the best and most recent examples being the “River Bend CCS” project announced by Talos Energy, Storegga, EnLink Midstream to be sited across “Iberville, St James, Assumption and Lafourche parishes…[with] access to an industrial area emitting around 80 million tonnes per year of CO2.” With respect to the role of EOR in CCS it is clear that EOR allows for the extraction of those hard to reach oil pockets, however, research showed “that between 3.7 and 4.7 metric tons of CO2 are emitted for every metric ton of CO2 injected”.