A carbon dioxide pipeline captures CO2 emissions from facilities like ethanol plants before compressing it and transporting it via a pipeline to a site where it can be stored underground indefinitely. This reduces the carbon intensity of ethanol.
In late June, the Iowa Utilities Board (IUB) approved a petition by Summit Carbon Solutions for the construction of a carbon dioxide pipeline across the state of Iowa. According to the IUB, because the pipeline is considered for “public use,” Summit can seize land from land owners via eminent domain, which has historically been used to seize private land for government projects that seek to serve a public good and is normally used for private businesses.
The company says it has already reached agreements with more than 2,700 land owners to build its pipeline.
It's all part of a broader plan by Summit to build pipelines across Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Minnesota. Spanning 2,500 miles, the project has an estimated cost of $5.5 billion and will keep the captured carbon dioxide in deep underground storage sites in North Dakota.
The company is also seeking billions of dollars from the federal government. Should their pipeline become operational, they could receive as much as $85 per metric ton in tax credits. They plan to sequester as many as 18 million tons of carbon dioxide every year, which means that the tax credits they receive each year could exceed at $1.5 billion.
The project has reportedly already attracted interest from ethanol producers in the five states involved, with 57 ethanol plants hoping to sell captured carbon dioxide to Summit. In addition to the payments from Summit, the plants may be eligible for billions of dollars in federal funds that are given to ethanol plants that capture CO2. Moreover, by reducing their CO2 emissions, these ethanol producers could qualify their ethanol as a sustainable aviation fuel for use by commercial airlines.
Risky and unhelpful solution that is hurting farmers
However, this solution comes at the expense of farmers and land owners who are losing land and crop yields, and there are several other drawbacks as well. Past efforts involving carbon dioxide capture have not yielded good results. In fact, there are already 47 significant CO2 capture and storage plants in the world, and most of them have been sustaining financial losses despite receiving heavy government subsidies. Not only do the ethanol plants who use the pipeline stand to lose money, but the taxpayers who are funding these subsidies will also lose out.
One example of their poor track record is the Quest CCS project in Alberta, Canada, that is operated by Shell. It captures just over a third of the carbon dioxide emitted in the process of upgrading bitumen from oil sands. The $811 million project was fully paid for by grants from the government and will cost $41 million to run per year; just $27 million of this is offset in the payments provided by carbon credit subsidies.
All of the existing CCS facilities are only capturing 0.1% of the world's industrial emissions, which is not having an effect on global temperatures, and even the Sierra Club considers these efforts to be “false climate solutions.”
There is also the risk of rupturing with these pipelines, which is what happened to a CO2 pipeline in Mississippi in 2020. When it ruptured, it emitted CO2 for roughly four hours in an invisible cloud the forced evacuations of hundreds of people in the surrounding rural community and sent at least 45 people to the hospital with problems such as an inability to breathe, shaking and unconsciousness.
It's clear this is nothing more than a giant tax dollar dump, building an entire industry that produces nothing but harms crop yields and steals land from farmers. The climate alarmist crowd is really good at coming up with new ways to make money without actually doing anything to improve the planet.
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