In September, Bonnie Ewoldt and her husband received certified letters from a company called Summit Carbon Solutions telling them that their 170-acre soybeans-and-corn farm in Crawford County, Iowa, was in the path of a pipeline that would carry carbon dioxide from ethanol plants across the Midwest to an underground storage site in North Dakota.
They’d never heard of such a thing.
“We just thought it was ridiculous,” Ewoldt, 76, recalled.
A retired high school teacher and former local newspaper columnist, Ewoldt began researching the project online.
Summit had pitched the $4.5 billion pipeline several months earlier as “the world’s largest carbon capture and storage project,” saying it would help Iowa’s ethanol industry remain viable by lowering its carbon footprint as the country races to curb the effects of climate change. But first, Summit needed to bury the lines beneath thousands of parcels of privately owned property, mostly farmland.
Ewoldt worried about her farm being damaged, or losing its value. And she saw the project as a violation of the deep emotional connection farmers have to their land. She became an anti-pipeline activist, writing letters to Iowa newspapers and organizing an opposition group of fellow farm owners.
She is now among hundreds of holdouts who have formed an alliance with some environmentalists who say the pipeline project plan is unsafe, pointing to a 2020 leak at a carbon dioxide pipeline in Mississippi that sickened dozens of people. Summit says the pipeline will be safe during construction and once it starts carrying carbon dioxide, which will be in a purer form than the Mississippi pipeline.
The opponents also argue that the pipeline — one of dozens of carbon capture projects that have launched in recent years, backed by billions of dollars in federal subsidies — will do little to fight climate change.
Two more companies have announced plans to build similar pipelines in Iowa, making the state a focal point in an escalating battle over carbon capture, an old technology that has largely been used to squeeze more oil out of the ground but is now being promoted as an environmental cure.
The clash in Iowa has led to protests and tense public hearings, a pattern that has unfolded in states across the country amid a boom in carbon capture and storage. There are only 12 such projects operating commercially in the United States, but, fueled by a blast of federal subsidies, there are 85 in development, 51 of which were announced in 2021 alone, according to the Clean Air Task Force, a nonprofit that advocates for the expansion of carbon capture.
While carbon capture has not yet proven to be financially sustainable, and its environmental benefits are debatable, it is now seen by some as one of the last hopes to curb planet-warming emissions before the world passes a tipping point into unprecedented heat waves, droughts, fires, floods and extinctions of species.
President Joe Biden has made carbon capture and storage a cornerstone of his climate plan. Biden’s infrastructure law, enacted in November, includes more than $8 billion for carbon capture projects, and he has proposed more generous tax breaks for developers that have yet to be approved by Congress. That’s on top of more than $8 billion in direct funding and tax credits that the federal government has already given carbon capture projects since 2010 — despite the fact that government watchdogs have found a high failure rate and evidence of improperly claimed tax credits.
A variety of polluting industries — ethanol, natural gas, coal, chemicals — see carbon capture as a way to deliver on emission-reduction promises and compete in carbon-credit programs while keeping their existing operations productive. Increasing federal subsidies could…
Read More: A growing battle over carbon capture and climate change riles Iowa