Despite the Biden administration’s enthusiasm for capturing carbon emissions from power plant and ethanol manufacturers, moving the CO2 by pipeline and storing it underground, other barriers continue to raise problems for the young technology.
While technology to capture CO2 stack emissions has well-known problems, those appear to be engineering and economic issues, more likely to be overcome. More difficult is the most mundane aspect of the carbon capture and storage (CCS) approach to salvaging existing industrial fossil fuel emissions: pipelines to move the CO2 across state lines.
Last month (Aug. 21) the South Dakota Supreme Court ruled against Summit Carbon Solutions (SCS), which has proposed a CO2 pipeline across the Mount Rushmore State. It would be part of a 2,000-mile, $9 billion project to collect CO2 emissions from corn ethanol conversion plants in Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, Minnesota, and North Dakota and store them deep underneath North Dakota. The project has faced fierce landowner objections in all of the states.
The South Dakota court overturned a lower state court, which said the project was a common carrier and therefore entitled to use eminent domain to seize property over a landowner’s objection. The high court said that “the record does not demonstrate that SCS is holding itself out to the general public as transporting a commodity for hire. It is thus premature to conclude that SCS is a common carrier, especially where the record before us suggests that CO2 is being shipped and sequestered underground with no apparent productive use.”
In a legal irony, just days later (Aug. 28) the Iowa Public Utilities Commission gave a formal greenlight to the pipeline to cross the Hawkeye State. The Iowa decision was expected, as the commission had approved the project in June and the ruling last week was a paperwork formality.
The South Dakota court ruling could directly impact the Iowa case. According to CBS Cedar Falls affiliate KGAN, a similar case is pending at the state’s highest court, with oral arguments set for Oct. 8. Jeff Mazour of the Sierra Club Iowa Chapter told the TV station, “One of our main arguments is that Summit’s not a common carrier. So it really does change the game here in Iowa as well.”
The problem facing CO2 pipeline developers is familiar to those seeking to build multi-state high-voltage electric transmission lines: state law. That’s not a problem for interstate natural gas pipelines. In 1947, as gas pipelines were just beginning to develop, Congress amended the 1938 Natural Gas Act to permit natural gas companies to exercise the power of federal eminent domain over private land and indigenous territory (despite the often ignored doctrine of tribal sovereignty). In 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the power granted to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to grant federal eminent domain over private property also applies to state-owned lands.
The Iowa House has twice passed legislation that would give landowners unambiguous rights in disputes with CO2 pipeline projects. The bills died in the state Senate.
In Minnesota, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports, dozens of local landowners “came to a Fergus Falls event center where skeptics and supporters aired their views about a steel pipeline that would transport carbon dioxide from an ethanol plant across 28 rural miles to the North Dakota border.” At the late August meeting, local landowner Linda Smith said, “If this would spring a leak, there is no way I get to safety in three minutes. We’ve got our roots really deep here. We can’t pick up and move.”
If transportation is a show stopper for carbon capture and storage, that also means deep underground storage won’t be part of the carbon reduction equation.
What’s left? How about utilization?
Investment banker Adam Aziz with UK investment firm DAI Magister told The Quad Report in an email, “Various emerging applications for captured CO2, each at different stages of development and commercialisation, are integral to the work of carbon capture companies. These new applications offer capture companies additional ways to generate revenue by creating demand beyond the various credits, offsets, and tax incentives.
“The carbon value chain presents immense opportunities for innovative project developers and technology providers who can enable a broad range of utilisation use cases. From mineralisation and synthetic fuels to biological conversion processes, the field of carbon utilisation is ripe with potential for groundbreaking technologies and applications.
“However, like the upstream part of the value chain, robust regulatory frameworks and pricing mechanisms are essential, to stimulate the development and deployment of these technologies at scale in the coming years.”
–Kennedy Maize