From The Epoch Times By Beth Brelje
June 10, 2022

She arrived without an appointment, walked past the front desk of the nursing home complex, and stopped at Hanson’s independent-living senior apartment.

Hanson, 96, let her in and they had a conversation about his Webster County, Iowa farm and how Summit Carbon Solutions wants to pay him around $30,000 for an easement on his property, a long, diagonal swath cutting a field in half, from corner to corner, to install a pipeline. Not for natural gas. Not for oil. The land is needed, the woman explained, as part of the Midwest Carbon Express, a 2,000-mile web of pipelines in five states: Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, South Dakota, and North Dakota. The company needs easements from landowners for all 2,000 miles.

The project will pull carbon from more than 30 ethanol plants, liquify it, and send it to North Dakota where it will be buried in rock about a mile underground to stay permanently. It is a “carbon capture, utilization, and storage” (CCUS) project, a green initiative to help save the earth from excess carbon emissions.

By allowing an easement for a pipeline on his land, Wayne Hanson was told he would be doing so much good for the environment and get that money in about 10 days. She laid the contract out in front of him. Just. Sign. Here.

But the doughnuts were not convincing. He said no, just like he had numerous times in phone calls from the company and during the last unannounced visit, when two other people came to his apartment with high pressure and a contract.

That is about how Wayne Hanson described it to his son, Dennis Hanson, a recently retired Lutheran minister who has power of attorney over his father’s affairs.

“She left a card,” Dennis Hanson told The Epoch Times. Dennis called and told her if they come unannounced again, they won’t be able to get in the building. He called it elder abuse: pressuring a senior to sign a paper now or face eminent domain and get a lower price for the easement later.

A receptionist at Summit Carbon Solutions took messages from The Epoch Times, but no one from the company returned calls for comment on this story.

The Hayek family has land next to the Hanson farm. Allen Hayek, 66, and his son Austin Hayek, 36, farm their own land and Hanson’s land through a lease.

They first heard about the Summit project through an informational meeting presented in Webster County in the fall of 2021. They started getting mail and then the phone calls; all day long, every two hours, for a week, on both Allen Hayek’s and his wife Chris’s cell phones. He doesn’t know how they got the numbers.

The calls still come. The company has sent registered mail, which the couple refuses. An easement person knocked on the door with a big packet of papers, as recently as two weeks ago. But despite an offer of around $50,000, they are a hard no.

Lucrative Project

“I realized from the first meeting what they were planning to do, and I didn’t want them through my land,” Allen Hayek told The Epoch Times. “They had plans with this CO2 that I didn’t agree with. It was just that simple. They just planned on pumping it to North Dakota and dumping it in a hole. One guy is going to make a bunch of money off this, and I don’t see much public use for it at all.”

Large-scale carbon sequestration projects will be lucrative as long as federal tax incentives are in place. The federal Carbon Capture and Sequestration tax credit, also called the 45Q, will pay up to $50 per ton for carbon that is captured and sequestered. But the tax credit expires. Construction on new carbon capture projects must begin before Jan. 1, 2026, to be eligible, so there is an urgency for carbon capture companies to get their projects started.

“Once completed, Summit Carbon Solutions’ project will be the largest carbon capture and storage project in the world,” the company’s website says. “This project will have the capacity to capture and permanently store up to 12 million tons of CO2 every year. That’s the equivalent of removing 2.6 million vehicles from our roads annually.”

At that rate, Summit would get $600 million a year in taxpayer money.

There is another rate, $35 a ton for carbon used to enhance oil recovery. This captured carbon is forced from pipelines into wells to remove more oil. In this scenario, the program uses taxpayer money to perpetuate the carbon-producing fossil fuel industry, while paying companies for removing carbon from the environment.

“It’s not just permanently sequestered,” Jessica Mazour, conservation coordinator for the Iowa Chapter of the Sierra Club told The Epoch Times. “It’s used to pump more oil out of the ground, which is even further reason we shouldn’t be putting all our eggs into this basket.”

Similarly, the Summit project connects to ethanol plants which turn corn into a green additive for gasoline, reducing carbon emissions. With the electric car slated to take over by 2030, the project supports a gas-powered vehicle model that environmentalists in the federal government want to leave behind.

“One of those hard conversations that Iowa has been afraid to have, that’s been brought to the forefront right now, is the conversation around ethanol,” Mazour said. “From the beginning, ethanol was always supposed to be a bridge fuel. It was supposed to be something that helped wean ourselves off fossil fuels. Iowa went all-in on it, and literally put all of the eggs into that basket.”

In Iowa, 57 percent of the corn produced is used for ethanol fuel.

Rush to Build

Summit is the biggest, but not the only carbon capture pipeline proposed in Iowa, Mazour said. There are three for sure and rumors of up to five, including Summit, Navigator CO2 Ventures, and Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) partnering with Wolf Carbon Solutions. Other projects are planned around the nation.

“Everyone’s in a race to get their project approved and get their taxes. These tax credits, once all added up, will be more than their upfront infrastructure cost,” Mazour said. “They’re going to make a ton of money off the backs of the public.”

Mazour calls herself “a lefty, progressive” but says this project has crushed partisan politics. “I am talking with more Trump supporters than I have in my entire life. We’re finding common ground. We are acting together in a unit because we know how important it is,” Mazour said. “People who are told they have nothing in common are finding out we have a hell of a lot in common, and the difference is these powerful, wealthy companies and individuals who are taking advantage of the everyday Iowan.”

Brian Jorde Managing Lawyer at Omaha, Nebraska-based Domina Law Group is working in multiple states with more than 500 landowners who don’t wish to allow an easement to their land. The cases are about eminent domain abuse.

“When there’s a constitutional power that was originally limited to the government—the governmental entity taking something of a private citizen for the beneficial public use of all persons, that’s one thing,” Jorde told The Epoch Times. But now, Jorde says, state legislatures are handing out the powerful tool of eminent domain to any company that might form overnight.

Soon, Summit is expected to submit a document to the Iowa Utility Board, listing easements the company still needs where landowners won’t sign contracts. Summit will ask to use eminent domain and it will be up to the board to decide if the company qualifies to use it. Jorde predicts that no matter the decision, it will be challenged in court.

The project faces a similar situation in other states.

“If you are not paying attention, you will be next,” Jorde said. “As Americans, we are notorious for only caring about something when it’s at our doorstep and not getting out there and speaking up when others, unknown to us, are being affected. Well, guess what? You’re next. It’s coming to you or someone you know. Corporations roll on and people— your rights—are collateral damage to their profits. That’s the biggest problem.”

Next-generation Pays

Back out on the farm, the Hayeks have long been doing their part for the environment.

“My carbon footprint is already pretty low,” Hayek said. He practices no-till farming by not plowing his fields. He plants seeds in the existing ground cover, which develops a rich soil teeming with life, and prevents erosion. And like many farmers, he has developed “tiles” underground that enhance water drainage. Disturbing the tiles by digging a pipeline could cause long-term damage to the agricultural environmental best-practices science behind his farmland and impact neighboring farms that have drainage along the same tiles.

“They’re offering a fair amount of money, but still, compared to the cost of having to go back and fix my tiles and loss of production and all that,” Hayek, said, it is not worth it. Plus, the cost of land has shot up substantially and the offer no longer reflects that inflation.

“To me, it’s just not right. It’s a lot of taxpayer money that’s going to go fund [President Joe] Biden’s Green New Deal,” Hayek, said. “To me, my kids and grandkids are going to have to pay for this and the rest of it. And it’s not something that is a proven technology, that we know is even going to work.”