Carbon Pipeline Developer Wants New Start, Locals Keep Fighting

The company behind a proposed 2,500-mile carbon dioxide pipeline spanning the Midwest is refreshing its bid to win over landowners and see the long-delayed project over the finish line, even as property owners and local officials still try to stop it.

Summit Carbon Solutions’ struggle to secure the necessary land to build the pipeline, which would transport carbon dioxide captured at ethanol plants across the region to an underground storage site to be used or sequestered, has spurred legal battles, political fights, and grassroots opposition campaigns.

The project’s long-running headwinds have compelled Summit to head back to the drawing board.

It brought in a new leadership team over the summer, naming Joe Griffin—a longtime energy executive with ties to prominent oil businessman and Trump fundraiser Harold Hamm—as its new CEO. It’s offering property owners the chance to make money from the project tied to when the company’s owners are paid. It’s also offering to pay counties the pipeline would go through, and it will pay counties and landowners more money in accordance with how many landowners sign on.

“This is a fresh chapter for Summit Carbon Solutions,” Griffin said in an August letter sent to Iowa landowners on its planned pipeline route that haven’t yet signed on. “We’re committed to doing things right, listening carefully, and being a partner you can trust.”

New Route

Instead of routing the pipeline to North Dakota, the company is now looking at routing it to the Denver-Julesburg Basin, land home to oil and gas wells that’s nestled in Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, and Kansas. The company’s plans to route the pipeline to North Dakota hit a massive roadblock when South Dakota enacted a law making it illegal to use eminent domain—the process of taking a landowner’s property for public use—for carbon dioxide pipelines.

But whether Summit’s new leadership team, incentives for local property owners and counties, and potential new route help the company complete the project remain to be seen.

“Summit’s had so many reboots,” said Brian Jorde, managing lawyer for Nebraska-based Domina Law Group who’s represented hundreds of landowners fighting the project in both South Dakota and Iowa. “No one believes that they’re going to be any different this time.”

The Iowa Utilities Commission in 2024 approved a permit for the proposed pipeline, which prompted localities, landowners, and others to file petitions for judicial review related to the Commission’s decision.

The company and its opponents made their case in front of a judge in early October, said Steve Kenkel, CO2 pipeline project liaison for Shelby County, Iowa, one of the localities petitioning for a judicial review of the Commission’s decision.

“A lot could happen here,” said Kenkel, who previously chaired the county’s Board of Supervisors.

While opponents challenge the IUC’s permit approval for the project, Summit in September applied to amend its application in part to remove a provision requiring the company to get the project approved in South Dakota before it starts building the pipeline in Iowa. That would help free up Summit to change the pipeline’s route.

In some respects, Summit’s plight isn’t unique. Navigator CO2 Ventures and Wolf Carbon Solutions in recent years proposed similar projects in the Midwest, but ultimately scrapped those efforts in light of fierce pushback.

Continued Resistance

The carbon pipeline debate notably has environmental groups and conservative landowners on the same side: Some environmental organizations don’t like carbon capture because they see it as helping emitters of fossil fuels, while some landowners around Summit’s proposed pipeline route are worried about the pipeline’s proximity to their property, and are dismayed over the potential for the company to use a federal tax credit incentivizing carbon capture utilization and storage.

Summit, as part of its pipeline plans, wants to use land Darlene Partlow and her husband deeded to their two sons around an hour west of Des Moines, along with her husband’s and sister-in-law’s land. The letter from Summit’s new CEO didn’t assuage Partlow’s concerns about the project.

“If they truly want to reinvent themselves, they need to get rid of the threat of eminent domain, and if we want to say no, we say no,” she said. The group of landowners she’s been working with to fight the company have a saying they use, she said: “A wolf in sheep’s clothing is still a wolf.”

Landowners expressed concerns over a potential pipeline rupture like the one a handful of years ago in Satartia, Miss., that sent dozens to the hospital.

“You don’t get a do-over with some of this stuff and you could potentially kill people,” Iowa resident Daphne Willwerth said at the Webster County, Iowa, Board of Supervisors meeting in early October. “I really am concerned with the safety issue.”

J.D. Myers, a representative for Summit who works on agriculture relations, addressed safety concerns at the meeting, explaining the main line valves on the pipeline would also be able to serve as safety valves that can be shut off if there’s a leak. He said the company has a leak detection system in which people in the area are notified in a “reverse 911" call.

“The advice is to stay indoors because the CO2 isn’t going to force its way into your house,” Myers said. Some Iowa residents, meanwhile, have said they’re dubious that would be the case.

Summit has obtained voluntary easements from about 75% of landowners along the company’s original planned route, spokesperson Sabrina Zenor said.

Should Summit head west to the Denver-Julesburg Basin, it would have to build more than it originally planned across Nebraska, where these types of projects need county-level approval.

Adopting a new route, however, could delay the project further. Summit initially aimed to be done building the pipeline in 2024, but later punted that timeline to early 2026. Zenor, Summit’s spokesperson, didn’t respond to requests for comment on when the project is slated to be finished.