Stephen Groves/AP Photo
Project developers plan to build carbon capture pipelines connecting dozens of Midwestern ethanol refineries, such as this one in Chancellor, South Dakota, shown on July 22, 2021.
Last week, President Biden visited an ethanol plant in central Iowa where he hailed increased infrastructure investment, particularly in biofuels like ethanol, as essential to a net-zero carbon future. But he didn’t acknowledge the environmental downsides of the projects that companies want to build to pursue those goals. Biden’s trip came on the heels of a late-March “people’s public hearing” at the Iowa State Capitol, where dozens spoke out against three carbon capture pipeline projects proposed for the Midwest. Deborah Main was with them. She and her husband live on the 195-acre Woodbury County, Iowa farm, northeast of Sioux City, where she was raised. It has been in their family for more than 100 years, and Iowa recognizes it as a “Century Farm.”
Last August, Summit Carbon Solutions, an offshoot of the Alden, Iowa–based Summit Agricultural Group, also contacted Main’s 96-year-old parents who live in nearby Plymouth County, about a new carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) project, the Midwest Carbon Express Pipeline. The proposed path would cut through the entire east side of Main’s family farm, which now serves as grazing land for a cattle herd and cradles a pond fed by a watershed that extends through several northeastern Iowa counties.
In the months that followed, Main learned that her family’s land, along with the holdings of Indigenous communities and hundreds of landowners across the state, has become a flashpoint in a bigger battle—one that is reminiscent of the fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). Only this time around, CCS companies and their political allies have adopted the language of climate change mitigation to quell fears about the project as they undermine land rights and dismiss concerns about local climate changes. In response to these multipronged threats, the Midwest anti-pipeline movement has reached a fever pitch, uniting environmentalists, Indigenous communities, and local residents across the political spectrum.
Backed by investors like John Deere and shale oil baron Harold Hamm, the Midwest Carbon Express is a 2,000-mile, $4.5 billion pipeline that would pressurize and transport about 12 million tons of carbon dioxide siphoned from corn ethanol processing annually. It would link at least 31 ethanol plants in Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota, and South Dakota to a terminus in North Dakota, where liquefied carbon dioxide would be injected into a porous rock geologic basin more than a mile underground for permanent storage. The project, if built, would be the largest CCS pipeline in the world and generate significant tax credits for the company and its ethanol manufacturing partners.
Summit representatives have presented the Midwest Carbon Express as an essential step to preserve and “decarbonize” ethanol production in Iowa, which accounts for a quarter of total U.S. production. But environmental advocates and climate scientists warn that CCS technology is not a one-size-fits-all climate change solution. CCS can be utilized to boost oil production through a specialized process, while pipeline construction, operation, and maintenance also produce carbon emissions.
The Iowa Utilities Board (IUB) regulates public-utility infrastructure and permits new projects, and prohibits private companies from directly contacting landowners until a project proposal has been announced at a public information meeting. But follow-up community meetings hosted by Summit Carbon were often announced at the last minute and held at the peak of harvest season.
Eminent domain rests on the exclusive power of state or federal government entities, but they have also ceded these powers to private companies.
Moreover, the initial Midwest Carbon Express meetings did not occur until mid-September last year, weeks after Summit Carbon approached Main’s parents and returned to the property a second time to request to survey their land. Agreeing to a survey does not equal interest in granting an easement to the company, but Main’s family views Summit’s entitled attitudes about access to their property as unacceptable.
For nearly six months, Summit Carbon has pursued easements with Iowa landowners. Easements can be voluntarily obtained if landowners agree and receive fair-market compensation. Or they can be acquired by eminent domain, utilizing “public use” designations to override landowners’ property rights. Under Iowa law, landowners receive compensation and retain the right of ownership to the entire parcel of land even if specific parcels have been granted eminent domain.
Eminent domain rests on the exclusive power of state or federal government entities, but they have also ceded these powers to private companies. The IUB allowed Dakota Access LLC, a subsidiary of Phillips 66 and Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners, to exercise eminent domain powers for DAPL: About 15 percent of the 1,295 tracts of Iowa land used for the DAPL were forcibly taken.
Once a private company obtains an easement, it has the right to dig, install, and maintain the pipeline, and enter the property at will. Some landowners have voluntarily ceded land rights for compensation, but many more have joined forces with environmental activists to resist pressure from Summit representatives. There was some initial resistance to working with “tree-hugging” groups like the Sierra Club and Food & Water Watch, but residents turned to their local chapters for help when many state and local officials—both Democratic and Republican—ignored them.
Emma Schmit, a senior organizer for the Iowa chapter of Food & Water Watch, saw the lack of a united landowner strategy as one of the failings of DAPL resistance in Iowa. That’s not the case this time around. There are weekly community meetings, Facebook groups, and email chains with organizing tactics and upcoming events, which connect landowners and tribes to legal representation and guidance. Taking lessons from what they faced before, folks are prepared to fight back. “We’ve been able to bridge divides on every level—Democrats and Republicans, rural and urban, young and old,” says Schmit.
Summit Carbon boasts about its tribal outreach and community engagement on its website, but the individuals involved in those consultations and “cultural surveys” report that Summit representatives have shown little respect for or understanding of Indigenous people. “So far, we just really don’t see that on the ground,” says Mahmud Fitil, Frontlines Action and Logistics coordinator for the Great Plains Action Society, a coalition of regional Indigenous organizers.
During a video call earlier this year, Summit Carbon displayed a map of the proposed pipeline route that demarcated federally recognized tribal reservations. But when Fitil asked them to identify the lands of the Winnebago tribe of Nebraska, representatives could not, even though the pipeline is slated to run just north of the reservation. Queries related to training for tribal first responders in the case of a pipeline-related accident have also gone unanswered. This “forked-tongue speaking,” as Donnielle Wanatee, a Meskwaki Nation member and a grassroots DAPL resistance leader, put it in a “Prairie Not Pipelines” December webinar, seems to characterize much of Summit Carbon’s approach.
A February 2020 carbon pipeline rupture in Satartia, Mississippi, also demonstrated the health risks of these pipelines, particularly for frontline tribal nations and communities of color. First responders reported that some of the people they rescued acted “like zombies” and required hospitalization. Concentrated carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide gases cause this disorientation, and as exposure times increase, severe effects include unconsciousness, coma, and death by asphyxiation.
The IUB has yet to permit Summit Carbon’s proposal, which was submitted in January. In past statements, the IUB has insisted that eminent domain is not an automatic right, yet it remains unclear how the IUB would decide when and where eminent domain should be granted. In to a statement provided to the Prospect, IUB spokesman Don Tormey noted that, “The IUB examines what the company submits and determines whether eminent domain should be granted for that parcel. The IUB reaches this determination based on the evidence submitted in the docket about that parcel.”
Iowa regulations state that the IUB can grant the right of eminent domain to pipeline companies if it is “found to be suitable and in the public interest.” Tormey noted in his statement that the board reviews evidence in favor of or opposing the proposed pipeline and uses Supreme Court, state court, and agency precedents to make these determinations on a parcel-by-parcel basis, but did not provide any specific examples.
Brian Jorde, a trial attorney with the Nebraska-based Domina Law Group who has represented landowners against eminent domain abuses, and is working on the multistate legal strategy, claims that there is no public-use aspect to CCS projects like the Midwest Carbon Express. “Politics should have no bearing on the law and decisions made by commissioners, board members, and agencies,” Jorde says.
All three current IUB board members were appointed by either Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds (Bruce Rastetter, the Summit Agricultural Group CEO, has donated to her campaigns) or former Gov. Terry Branstad (a senior policy adviser at Summit Carbon since March 2021 and President Trump’s ambassador to China). Reynolds issued an executive order last year creating a carbon sequestration task force that includes various agricultural investors, energy company CEOs, and IUB chair Geri Huser, among others. It does not include representatives from any leading environmental organizations in Iowa, and Reynolds has repeatedly put off meeting requests from constituents opposed to CCS projects. Reynolds’s office did not respond to a request from the Prospect to discuss the task force.
In late March, the Iowa House of Representatives passed an appropriations bill that included an amendment that would prevent the IUB from holding eminent domain hearings for carbon capture projects until February 1, 2023. But the legislation remained stalled in the Senate, and the 2022 Iowa legislative session concluded this week without further action.
Deborah Main and her parents never considered signing a voluntary easement, but they fear that the IUB will allow Summit Carbon to take their land by eminent domain in order to secure a right-of-way for the Midwest Carbon Express. “If this pipeline gets approved, it’s going to release a whole Pandora’s box of carbon sequestration pipelines,” says Main.
This story has been corrected to indicate that Iowa landowners receive compensation and retain their property rights under eminent domain, clarifies how the IUB reaches its decisions on granting eminent domain, and updates where Deborah Main and her parents live.
