IOWA (LifeSiteNews) – Agricultural interests have come out against plans to build a 2,000-mile “carbon capture” pipeline across Midwestern states, including Nebraska and Iowa.
Summit Carbon Solutions wants to build a pipeline through Midwestern states that will capture carbon and store it underground in the name of stopping man-made climate change. The Midwest Carbon Express project would move “climate-warming greenhouse gases from Midwest biofuels plants to North Dakota for permanent storage underground,” according to Reuters.
But farmers, ranchers, and other agricultural interests have raised concerns about the effects of the pipeline on their livelihood.
The company also wants to be able to enter onto the private farmland to survey it.
“This is a private company seeking something that isn’t in the best interest of the public,” cattle farmer and Nebraska resident Bev Kutz told Reuters.
“It would go more than half a mile through prime farmland,” Dan Tronchetti, an Iowa corn and soybean farmer, told Reuters. Summit is interested in his property for its carbon pipeline path.
There is also a fear that the company could use eminent domain to force landowners to sell or offer access to their properties.
“If the Board were to grant Summit Carbon the power of eminent domain, county compensation commissions would determine the ‘just compensation’ to which the individual landowners would be entitled,” Iowa State University’s agricultural law center said. “Landowners and Summit Carbon would have the right to appeal these initial determinations through the Iowa court system.”
The Midwest Carbon Express “would have the capacity to capture and permanently store 12 million metric tons of carbon dioxide every year,” according to Iowa State University’s Center for Agricultural Law and Taxation.
“The proposed pipeline would also cross through four other states – North Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota, and South Dakota – and would capture and transport the emissions from more than 30 ethanol plants for long-term underground sequestration. Summit Carbon projects a 2024 completion date,” the center said on an information page about the project.
Tronchetti and fellow landowners want to be able to communicate with other opponents, but the Iowa Utilities Board sided with Summit to block the release of the names of “thousands of individual landowners in the path of Summit Carbon Solutions’ proposed carbon sequestration pipeline,” according to the Des Moines Register.
“It is obvious the only reason Summit wants to keep the names secret is to prevent, or at least make it more difficult for, landowners to communicate with each other, to organize a response to Summit, and to protect their property rights,” the Sierra Club wrote in opposition. The environmental group is concerned about the pipeline’s possibility to be used for further oil exploration.
Other companies are looking at the Midwest for similar projects. “Texas-based Navigator CO2 Ventures proposes building a 900-mile pipeline across 36 Iowa counties, a project that would cost at least $2 billion,” the Des Moines Register reported.
The pipelines could help alleviate rising oil and gas prices, however.
The Sierra Club said that the carbon pipelines could “allow for the extension of fossil fuel extraction through enhanced oil recovery,” referring to the use of carbon to retrieve oil from a harder-to-reach reservoir.
The environmental group said carbon capture and sequestration is “a false solution that takes us farther away from our climate goals.”
“These pipelines continue business as usual, will only be feasible with massive public subsidies, and should not be approved,” the Sierra Club said.