OPINION

North Dakota.

Once there, Summit claims, the CO2 will be “permanently and safely stored underground.”

While all of that scrubbed pleasantspeak may sound like an innovative, agbased way to somewhat balance the amount of climate-changing carbon emitted by today’s intensive livestock and cropping systems, the Oakland Institute sees it as a pressurized pipeline of baloney.

... to boost oil production” that is then refined and burned to create even more CO2.

Summit won’t say what the CO2 will, in the end, be used for; but maps of its proposed pipeline route show the five-state network ending in North Dakota — home of one of the nation’s largest “frac” oil fields, the Bakken, which relies almost entirely on enhanced oil recovery techniques to keep its thick crude oil pumping and its carbon-black river running.

Last November, the Oakland Institute — an independent policy think tank in Oakland, Calif. — published a detailed report on one of these costly, gassy trains: Summit Carbon Solutions’ 2,000-mile carbon pipeline across Iowa, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, and Minnesota.

Summit calls its expensive, scientifically-dubious project the Midwest Carbon Express because it hopes to tie 33 “biorefineries” (mostly ethanol plants) together with a pipeline ranging from “four inches to two feet in diameter and placed at least four feet underground” to carry compressed CO2 to

In fact, the Institute uses another descriptive B word in the title of its 31-page report that gets right to the heart of Summit’s plan. It calls it “The Great Carbon Boondoggle.”

Oakland states that backers of Summit’s carbon capture and storage technology overlook “the growing body of evidence exposing CCS as a false climate solution…” Indeed, “Despite billions of taxpayer dollars spent on CCS to date… it has not been proven feasible or economic at scale.”

Even more damning, the report continues, “Over 95 percent of the CO2 captured by these plants” (mostly ethanol, natural gas processing, or fertilizer plants) “is currently used for enhanced oil recovery

Furthermore, “Summit also claims the pipeline will ‘bolster the ethanol and agriculture industries,’ by making the ethanol produced at their partner facilities ‘net zero fuel’ by 2030.” More Grade A baloney, says Oakland.

The think tank isn’t the only group questioning Summit’s grandiose Midwest Carbon Express. Farmers, too, are less than enthusiastic about granting Summit pipeline easements across their land — no matter the size or depth,.

According to Oakland’s report, Summit began gathering voluntary easements in the summer of 2021 along its planned route. By August, Summit claimed to have “agreements with 1,400 landowners [on] 2,200 tracts of land across the entire Midwest” and “easements” with 700 landowners on 1,500 par-

See GUEBERT, pg. 8

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