Rural Iowans are starting to hear from pipeline companies that their properties stand along the routes for proposed carbon dioxide-carrying pipelines. If the landowners don’t voluntarily grant them access to drill on their lands, the companies could get permission to do so anyway through the “eminent domain” process.
Such designations, which are permitted for projects that have some public benefit, garnered attention, not much of it positive, after the Dakota Access Pipeline came through and left long-term damage to some land and crops.
Even those without land along the route have a stake in protecting the environment and beating back climate change. But these carbon-capture projects are billed as solutions to environmental problems some Iowans weren't even sure existed. Navigator CO2 Ventures, one of three companies that will seek approval from the Iowa Utilities Board, would take carbon dioxide emitted from ethanol and chemical fertilizer plants and transport it to a destination in Illinois to be dehydrated and buried deep underground. The other two companies are Summit Carbon Solutions and Archer Daniels Midland.
Until now, CO2 has been released into the air from ethanol plants, but that was downplayed as a problem. "It calls out the lie that ethanol is clean energy," quips Ed Fallon of Bold Iowa, a nonprofit opposing the project. And if the emissions really weren’t troubling, then would we embrace something classified as a "hazardous project" — much less want it running under our properties?
At an informational meeting in Ames this month, Elizabeth Burns-Thompson, Texas-based Navigator's vice president of public affairs, said Iowa needs a pipeline because its geology isn't suited to burying the carbon dioxide here. The pipeline would run 1,300 miles, more than 800 of those in Iowa, which she said represents a $3 billion investment, $1.6 million of which would stay here, generating 5,000 jobs.
Burns-Thompson, who described herself as a “farm kid from here in Iowa,” said the project is of value to the agricultural community. "This is your land. Treating it with utmost respect is our top priority," she said of Navigator and project partners Valero Energy Corp. and BlackRock Global Energy & Power. "The facility could reduce its carbon intensity score by 50%," she said.
Carbon pipeline projects rely on significant tax incentives
As she acknowledged, a key driver of such pipeline projects is taking advantage of federal government tax incentives. The tax benefit colloquially referred to as 45Q offers $50 per ton of permanently sequestered CO2, or $35 if it's used for enhanced oil recovery, another option. Ultimately Navigator hopes to store and store 15 million tons.
But using public tax dollars for fossil fuel production isn't quite what some environmentalists have in mind. "It's a false climate solution," says Carolyn Raffensperger of Ames, an environmental lawyer and executive director of the national Science and Environmental Health Network. She shared a report compiled by environmental historian Peter Montague of seven failed carbon capture projects in the U.S. and one in Canada. Significantly, Archer Daniels Midland had one of them.
"Archer Daniels Midland does not appear to share federal officials’ enthusiasm for carbon capture and storage," says the report, which noted that a company feasibility study for cutting its corporate greenhouse gas emissions 25% didn't even include carbon capture and sequestration. The company wrote in 2020 that "the ability to capture stack emissions and sequester them is likely 10 years out."
Montague added: "Nevertheless, in early 2022, ADM announced that it was partnering with Wolf Carbon Solutions to develop a pipeline to carry away carbon dioxide from ADM’s facilities in Clinton and Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and “The pipeline will have a reported capacity of 12 million tons of liquified carbon dioxide per year, far more than ADM alone would need."
Concerns are many, including 'prolonging the fossil fuel era'
Some opponents say such measures would either help forestall real changes to our carbon footprint, or soon become obsolete, as electric cars gain favor and ethanol is no longer needed to fuel them. The Center for International Environmental Law says, "Until now, carbon capture and storage (CCS) have been primarily used to 'keep the coal industry alive,'" and to benefit gas and oil interests.
A researcher for the center argues that the practice "masks the harmful carbon emissions from the underlying source, enabling that source to continue operating," generates additional risks and costs from pipelines and "exacerbates global warming by boosting oil production and prolonging the fossil fuel era."
Jessica Mazour, conservation coordinator at the Iowa Sierra Club, says that for every ton of CO2 that's sequestered, 1.2 to 1.4 tons would be generated from the extraction of fossil fuels. She calls it "greenwashing," a “false climate solution, when we should be investing in solar, wind, battery storage, conservation and efficiency."
There are also concerns over conflicts of interests in Iowa's process for approving such projects. Former Gov. Terry Branstad, a Republican, has a financial interest in pipelines as a policy adviser for Summit Carbon Solutions. Branstad also appointed, when he was governor, two of the three Iowa Utilities Board members who would vote on approval. The third was appointed by Gov. Kim Reynolds, who was Branstad's lieutenant governor, before becoming governor.
Reynolds has also called for state investment in carbon capture solutions. On Radio Iowa, she stressed state funding for Iowa State University to research how Iowa farmers could secure carbon credits for planting crops.
As it is, says Raffensperger, "Iowa is the most ecologically damaged state in the union." Yet its public universities get money to do research that benefits companies. "Where is the funding for university research that will solve the climate problem?"
Branstad has tried to discredit the Sierra Club for its opposition to these pipelines. He signed a letter sent to people in about a third of Iowa counties asking them to support the Summit pipeline and to not be "intimidated,” by the Sierra Club: “They are not your friends and will be long gone after they have destroyed the ethanol industry and the value of your corn-producing land.”
Then there's a secrecy element. Bruce Rastetter, CEO of Summit Agricultural Group, Summit's parent company, has asked the Iowa Utilities Board to not publicly release the names of landowners along the routes, for their privacy and because that could help Summit's competitors. But the Iowa attorney general's consumer advocate sought the release of the names, saying landowners who oppose the project should be able to mount a joint defense.
Opponents come from varying backgrounds, and they're organized
Steve Higgenbottom, a Wapello County, Iowa landowner, already felt burned by the Dakota Access Pipeline running through his property. Now his land stands in the path of another pipeline project. The last time, crews dug 30 feet down to install the pipeline, and put terraces above it, but the terraces settled and now he has drainage problems "football fields away from the pipeline." He said the company won't return to fix the problems; he estimated it would take $100,000. He calls this plan "pie in the sky."
To date, 15 county boards of supervisors have voted to oppose eminent domain use to access people's lands, according to Mazour.
The risk of a pipeline rupture and carbon dioxide leak is also a concern. It happened in 2020 in the small Mississippi community of Satartia. In HuffPost, journalist Dan Zegart reported on two dozen people being "overcome within a few minutes, collapsing in their homes; at a fishing camp on the nearby Yazoo River; in their vehicles. Cars just shut off, since they need oxygen to burn fuel. Drivers scrambled out of their paralyzed vehicles, but were so disoriented that they just wandered around in the dark."
In Satartia, residents at least had a warning, says Raffensperger, because hydrogen sulfide, which smells, was mixed in with the CO2, which doesn't. If that concentrate were released in Iowa and mixed with water from a stream, it would acidify the liquid, making it undrinkable, she said.
If there's hopeful news here, it's that this time, more people are paying attention. The Sierra Club is partnering with eight other nonprofits to organize a diverse group of opponents, some 650 of whom meet weekly, Mazour says. "We've been told we're supposed to hate each other," she said of the urban and rural, Democratic and Republican cross-section, "but we actually have quite a bit in common. We care deeply about the land."
Raffensperger, who has read hundreds of comments submitted to the utilities board from affected parties, sees an extraordinarily powerful story of landowners working with environmentalists for future generations. "This conversation is fundamentally different than anything I've seen in Iowa," she said.
Could that be enough to beat back the big money and powerful forces at play?
"Money is the second strongest driver in politics," said Fallon, a former Iowa legislator. The only one greater force, he said, "is votes."
