Summit Carbon Solutions CEO Lee Blank said the company’s carbon dioxide pipeline is crucial for the future of Midwest agriculture, and that Summit is pushing ahead with trying to win over landowners in Iowa and South Dakota.
“Our company is going to be built on permits, and we have to go get the permits, and that's what we're currently working on,” Blank said at a meeting of the American Coalition for Ethanol in Omaha.
The five-state, 2,500-mile-long project is intended to gather carbon dioxide form ethanol plants throughout the upper Midwest and deposit it at a site in North Dakota.
The company has struggled to get needed approvals from state agencies and landowners, but the Iowa Utilities Commission in June approved Summit’s main liquid carbon dioxide pipeline through the state, a significant victory for the carbon capture and sequestration project after earlier denials in North Dakota and South Dakota.
The company now is starting the process of getting a permit for its expansion routes in Iowa.
Next week, the company will begin 23 public meetings in Iowa to talk to landowners who may be affected by those lines, Blank said. "Not everyone there is all that happy to think about the project coming across a particular property," he said.
Blank said the company would be applying for the second permit in Iowa 30 days after the public meeting process has concluded. He said he hoped the approval process would be shorter than it was the first time. “I truly hope it doesn't take 34 months, because that's what the first permit took ... start to finish," he said.
In South Dakota, the company is meeting with landowners to win their approval for the pipeline route before reapplying for approval of the project.
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Blank said he personally went to South Dakota to meet with landowners who “just simply don't like us or don't like our project.”
He said the company will continue having those meetings and conveying the message to landowners, “If you like it, we'll survey. If you don't like it, we will move on and try and survey someone else that does.”
In North Dakota, the company is waiting on a decision from the state on both the sequestration site and the pipeline. The hearing process is completed.
He said the company was less concerned about winning approval in Nebraska and would leave that process for later.
The ultimate goal of the pipeline is to lower the carbon intensity scores of participating ethanol plants, making it easier for them to qualify for federal and state incentives and find new markets in products such as sustainable aviation fuel.
Blank said corn growers need to find new domestic markets as they face increased competition from foreign producers.
"We have got to internalize the usage of our corn crop, and we have a way to do that, and it starts with the pipeline," he said.
