June 28, 2023

Fox Business News recently interviewed a South Dakota farmer named Jared Bossly. A company called Summit Carbon Solutions is laying the groundwork to run pipelines through five Midwestern farming states for the purpose of capturing, compressing, and transmitting CO2 from ethanol processing facilities to a final resting place deep below the ground, somewhere in North Dakota. Fox News reports that more than 80 eminent domain lawsuits have been filed in South Dakota for this purpose. Mr. Bossly’s wife (he was not home at the time) recorded footage of the occupants in an unmarked pickup truck with Louisiana license plates which parked, unannounced, on their property. The occupants entered the workshop on the premises near the farmhouse, rooted around a while, then proceeded to a more remote area of the property and began surveying.

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Summit Carbon tried to get a restraining order on Bossly and get him cited for contempt of court for allegedly threatening to kill the surveyors — a claim that Bossly vehemently denies, saying he only spoke to the surveyors for a few seconds on the phone. The contempt charges were dropped, but the surveying was approved by a judge.

In May, 2022, the Biden Administration announced a $3.5 billion program to capture carbon pollution from the air, and the money has been flowing copiously. A quick search on LinkedIn for companies engaged in Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage (CCUS) projects will reveal dozens of companies, most of which are U.S.-based. They are well-staffed and generously funded with millions of up-front taxpayer dollars.

Summit Carbon Solutions does have its share of proponents — among them ethanol producers, heads of Chambers of Commerce, and politicians of all stripes from state and local governments. It’s one thing to dangle large sums of other people’s money to induce cooperation, but landowners are apparently being bludgeoned into submission with eminent domain.

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The byline of the Dakota Free Press is “South Dakota’s True Liberal Media.” Readers of American Thinker will appreciate the opening paragraph of this article, gracefully titled “Awkward: Right-Wing Media Realizing Kristi Noem Sides with Global Climate Change Profiteers, Not South Dakota Property Owners”:

South Dakota landowners threatened with eminent domain by carbon dioxide pipeliner Summit Carbon Solutions are finding a sympathetic if somewhat awkward ear in the radical right-wing press. The generally loathsome Epoch Times sent a reporter to South Dakota to take quotes and pictures on the farm of good Spink County Democrat Ed Fischbach, who is leading the fight against the Iowa company’s plan to seize land without permission for its project.

The article conflates opposition to these pipelines with opposition to the Keystone Pipeline. However, eminent domain is meant to serve the common good: depriving the country of 800,000 barrels of oil/day from Keystone is different from depriving the country of CO2 from ethanol plants at the cost of billions of dollars. But talk about strange bedfellows — a vanguard of South Dakota liberal media siding with the “generally loathsome” Epoch Times!

The CCUS projects in the Midwestern faming states are all predicated on the continued, if not expanded, production of ethanol, because ethanol facilities present localized concentrations of CO2 that can be harnessed and disposed of more efficiently than merely sucking carbon dioxide out of the ambient atmosphere.

A Reuters article from March, 2022 reports that

The government estimates that ethanol is between 20% and 40% less carbon intensive than gasoline. But a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that ethanol is likely at least 24% more carbon intensive than gasoline, largely due to the emissions generated from growing huge quantities of corn [emphasis added].