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North Dakota’s Public Service Commission threw a major roadblock in the path of Summit Carbon Solutions’ Midwest Carbon Express on Aug. 4 when it voted unanimously to deny the company’s hazardous CO2 pipeline permit. According to PSC Chair Randy Christmann, Summit “failed to meet its burden of proof to show that the location, construction, operation and maintenance will produce minimal adverse effects on the environment and on the citizen of North Dakota.”
Summit’s proposed route in North Dakota is part of a 2,000-mile, five-state Carbon Storage and Sequestration (CCS) plan to carry liquid CO2 from 17 ethanol plants in South Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota and Iowa to North Dakota, where it would be permanently buried underground in abandoned oil wells west of Bismarck. When operational, investors in the $5.5 billion project would reap billions of dollars profit in carbon capture with 45Q federal tax credits. However, without the PSC permit and access to North Dakota’s underground storage sites, the Midwest Carbon Express is a pipeline to nowhere.
The Midwest Carbon Express is on shaky ground all along its multi-state route. Summit is seeking a permit in Iowa with little more than two-thirds of easements voluntarily signed. Hundreds of Iowa landowners refuse to sign and choose instead to face the prospect of eminent domain. Minnesota requires an Environmental Impact Study (EPS) and will not allow eminent domain to be used for this project. South Dakotans are outraged by the lack of action in their legislature and thousands have signed a petition demanding Gov. Kristi Noem call a special session.
Summit’s risky CO2 pipeline faces strong opposition. Environmentalists, conservatives, Indigenous Peoples, Republicans, Democrats, Independents and civic groups have joined with impacted landowners to stop one of the biggest land grabs in American history. A recent Iowa Poll by Selzer & Co. in The Des Moines Register found that 80% of Iowans across all demographics oppose the use of eminent domain for CO2 pipelines being built by a private company for profit.
In Iowa, Summit-impacted landowners, the Sierra Club and other interested parties have been frantically preparing for the Iowa Utilities Board (IUB) hearing for Summit’s permit, scheduled to begin in two short weeks on Aug. 22. Recently, the date was moved ahead from an anticipated start in October. This move by the IUB was a suckerpunch to intervenors who suddenly have four months less time to prepare testimony and consult with legal counsel.
Now that Summit has no way to get to the sequestration site in North Dakota, and the Midwest Carbon Express has no endpoint, the IUB hearing should be postponed indefinitely. Without a CCS storage location, there is no reason to waste time, resources, and tax-payer money to hold a hearing on a half-baked proposal for Summit’s permit.
The IUB needs to put the brakes on the Midwest Carbon Express. There is no urgent need to approve a permit for a dangerous CO2 pipeline to nowhere.
Bonnie Ewoldt | Milford
Summit Solutions applied to the Iowa Utilities Board for a pipeline permit over two years ago. A permit of this nature requires a public hearing, where Summit would give reasons why this pipeline is in the public interest followed by rebuttal from the public.
Normally the hearing would take place early in the permitting process to ensure unnecessary public and private resources are not expended.
The IUB has finally, after over two years and hundred of recorded objections to the pipeline, decided to hold this hearing, starting Aug. 22 in Fort Dodge. IUB has given Summit two years to try and get voluntary easements for a pipeline that is unpopular, unnecessary and dangerous.
Summit claims the ethanol industry will collapse and that C02 produced at ethanol plants is an important driver of climate change. Neither of these claims are substantiated by credible evidence.
The Fort Dodge hearing has been designed by the IUB to favor Summit by requiring Iowa’s concerned citizens to testify first, followed by Summit’s testimony. Normal legal procedure would be Summit testifying about the need followed by rebuttal from the public. The proof of public good rests with Summit and the balance of the testimony is to challenge their lack of any credible evidence.
Gordon Garrison | Estherville
Unlike good-guy-bad-guy movies, this one portrays real people in reflection of the shades, facets and fissures of human fallibility that approach and reproach in pose and repose of the soul of what passes as common decency — or throw another log or someone on the fire, and go see “Barbie.”
Recently we went and saw the movie “Oppenheimer” and it touched my awareness as a remarkable piece of art — ranging back through some past takeaways from the surrealism of Pablo Picasso’s larger than life anti-war painting “Guernica,” Grant Wood’s stoic regionalism reflected in “American Gothic,” and Vincent van Gogh’s loony post-impressionist shining down in “The Starry Night.” In accompaniment to the revealing dialog splashing into my dark ear holes, the flick came visually flashing in drawing me into a quantum of wonder more profound than Jackson Pollock’s “Mural” once did.
Never before have I seen an exposing flick like it. Both of us felt so touched that we got the biography upon which it is based, “American Prometheus.” I have already read through the preface and prologue (something I just don’t do). These two bits read just before I closed my eyes into nighttime sleep left me further fading in wonder of what to think.
On bright eyed awakening to the here and now of a new day, I can look clear back beyond a current crop of historic second guessers, that so fervently reject the dropping of those horrific atomic bombs on cities of non-combatant innocents, and know that back then in that old war they would have been cheering with enthusiasm equal to that of the people depicted in this new movie’s basketball-hall scene. New folks along with old wartimers would be roaring out in supportive accord to a perplexed Oppenheimer contending in hesitant wish that the bombs could have been developed in time to drop on Germany.
Now 78-years-later in sentiment reversing in as much confusion as Oppenheimer’s was wondering forward back then, I long recall in sadness the death of my older sister’s sweetheart who was killed in combat on Okinawa just three sunrises before the end of the last land battle of World War II, June 18, 1945. My unreserved wish back then, which still lingers on, was that such hell on earth could have been rained down before Marine Corps Bill, my hero, ended up being no more.
If someone today had back then told me how inhumane such a wish will ever be, I would have, like now, screamed, “Your damned second guessing is far too damn late and that kind of wishbone peace is as big of a kick in a dead horse’s ass as was the First World War fight to end all war.” In short, “We can all go to hell for neglectfully being party to evermore making the same on earth.”
Sam Osborne | West Branch
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