The land easement acquisition woman who knocked on Wayne Hanson’s door had a box of doughnuts.
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 wanted to pay him roughly $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 was needed, the woman said, 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 needed easements from landowners for all 2,000 miles.
The project would pull carbon from more than 30 ethanol plants, liquify it, and send it to North Dakota where it would be buried in rock about a mile underground, where it would stay permanently. It was a “carbon capture, utilization, and storage” 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 that he would be doing so much good for the environment and that he would get that money in about 10 days. She laid the contract out in front of him. Just. Sign. Here.
But the doughnuts weren’t 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’s 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 told The Epoch Times.
He called and told her that if they came unannounced again, they wouldn’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 cellphones. He doesn’t know how the company got the numbers.
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 [carbon dioxide] 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’s 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’s 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 reads. “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 per year in taxpayer money.
There’s another rate of $35 per 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.”
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 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,” she 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,” she 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 on 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,” he 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.
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 and environmental best-practices science behind his farmland and affect 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 isn’t worth it.
Also, the cost of land has shot up substantially and the offer no longer reflects that inflation.
Summit’s Response
After publication of this story, Summit discovered that it had sent an email agreeing to be interviewed for this story to the wrong address. The Epoch Times has verified that the company was willing, but didn’t have the opportunity to speak.Jesse Harris, a communications person for Summit, gave some additional context.
More than 40 ethanol plants already use carbon capture technology today and commercial-scale capture and compression has been in use since the 1990s. There are more than 5,000 miles of CO2 pipelines already in operation in the United States. Harris said the safe and permanent sequestration of CO2 has been researched for years and is supported by a wide range of stakeholders across the political spectrum at the federal and state level, along with engineers and scientists, including the U.S. Department of Transportation, which oversees pipelines.
Harris said the eminent domain conversation is premature. The company has secured voluntary easements for approximately 30 percent of the proposed route in Iowa. Project-wide, it has secured 1,600 voluntary easements, with more coming on board every day.
The Summit project won’t be used for enhanced oil recovery. The company is asking for regulatory approval for the “permanent storage of CO2.”
