Keeping the doors unlocked is a common practice on rural farms where farmers often work between the house, barn, and field. But country manners don’t allow strangers to enter buildings unannounced.
That’s what happened on May 3, when land surveyors for Summit Carbon Solutions arrived at the Brown County, South Dakota ranch of Jared and Tara Bossley, and the incident ended up in court.
Summit plans to build a “carbon capture, utilization, and storage” project, the Midwest Carbon Express, a 2,000-mile web of pipelines in five states: Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, South Dakota, and North Dakota. 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 as part of a green initiative against carbon emissions.
Carbon capture is a recent concept encouraged by the federal government through the federal Carbon Capture and Sequestration tax credit. The credit is worth up to $85 per ton of CO2 captured and sequestered. Summit Carbon Solutions—advertised as the largest carbon capture and storage project in the world when it is completed—will have the capacity to capture and permanently store up to 12 million tons of CO2 every year. At $85 a ton, the project will net $1.02 billion in tax incentives from taxpayers.
But first, the company needs easements from landowners all along the 2,000-mile project footprint, which includes part of the Bossley ranch.
Entering Without Permission
On May 3, the surveyors arrived without an appointment, while Jared was 10 miles away, planting alfalfa for a neighbor, and Tara was home, alone in the shower.“Someone opened the door and yelled in the house. Kind of an odd thing,” Jared Bossley told The Epoch Times. “I mean, if your house isn’t protected, what is anymore?”
The shower is on the second floor, far from the door. She heard someone calling, “Hello? Hello?” To hear that, they would have had to open the screen door and another door and, at minimum, stick their head into the house and possibly step inside. It is unclear just how far they came.
His wife got out of the shower, went down to see who was there, and when she saw two unidentified men and an unmarked truck on the property, she turned on the video cameras they use to monitor calving cows.
Videos provided to The Epoch Times show a man opening the darkened shop door, entering, then exiting after about five seconds. They also show the man returning to a pickup truck where another man seems to look directly into the camera.
They drove out to a field and set up a tripod. Tara called Jared, and he told her to drive out there and find out who they were.
“She jumped in her vehicle and drove up there, and right when she got out of the vehicle, she called me. I was on speakerphone, I think, and right when I picked up, I could hear them say Summit surveyors,” Jared Bossley said. “And that’s when I said, ‘If it’s Summit and they are there to survey, then the sheriff should be involved. I'll deal with this later,’ and I hung up. That was the whole conversation.”
Later, he checked his phone records and learned that the phone call lasted just six seconds.
Summit Calls Sheriff
A few days later, a sheriff’s detective arrived at the ranch and told Bossley that Summit said he threatened to kill them, and Bossley heard an entirely different version of the conversation.“They said that, ‘Oh, Mr. Bossley was concerned about the garbage in the field. We assured that there'd be no garbage.’ They make it sound like we had this big, long conversation and that I said, ‘I’m on my way, and I’m going to kill the first person I see.’ They’re just totally making all this stuff up. It’s ridiculous.”
Bossley says he never said any of that and that he certainly was not going to rush home. He was in a field, in tractor, 10 miles away.
“I didn’t have a pickup with me. I’m in a tractor that goes about 12 miles an hour down the road. There’s no rushing home,” Bossley said. “And I’ve got witnesses that were planting beets across the road from me up there. I just kept planting. I didn’t think anything of it. I just thought it was over when they left.”
He stayed in the field for four more hours.
About two weeks later, he learned from his attorney that the company filed papers saying Bossley was in contempt of court for trying to prevent the surveyors from doing their job.
“My wife is pretty worked up,” Bossley said. “I mean, her exact words were, ‘I’m scared to be home alone now.’ Well, that, as the man of the house and protector of the homestead, it really pisses me off because you kind of feel like a failure. Your wife shouldn’t be scared to be in her house. And they are making us out to be the bad guys. We didn’t do anything. They just came.”
The way Bossley sees it, they were trespassing, and they should be the ones charged. He says he did nothing to stop them from surveying.
“Rules don’t apply to hazardous pipeline companies and the persons they employ,” Brian Jorde, managing lawyer at Domina Law Group in Omaha, Nebraska, who represents Bossley, told The Epoch Times. “They do what they want to advance their goals, whether that is breaking and entering onto private property or an open display of firearms to intimidate landowners from being on their own land. Welcome to Summit’s South Dakota.”
Since the incident, Summit has hired armed security guards to accompany survey crews onto landowners’ property, Jorde said.
Another landowner, Ken Shafer, shot a June 6 photo of a Summit security guard with a handgun holstered on his hip in McPherson County.
“At Summit Carbon Solutions, the safety of landowners, the communities where we will operate, and our employees and contractors is ingrained in our corporate values and reflected in all we do. As an example of how we constantly meet that commitment, our team continues to conduct biological and cultural surveys to determine a route for our project that mitigates potential impacts to public safety and the environment,” John Satterfield, director of regulatory affairs, told The Epoch Times in a June 14 email.
He characterized the results of the court case at the end of his statement, saying: “The overwhelming majority of survey work conducted over the past two years has included voluntary permission from landowners for access. Where it has become necessary, we have made the decision to hire security contractors to ensure the safety of our team members as they complete this important work.
In Brown County specifically, Summit recently reported an incident to the county sheriff’s office that involved a landowner threatening one of our team members, which clearly necessitated taking this step. The sworn affidavits of witnesses and the facts of this case overwhelmingly supported the need for the courts to issue a restraining order against the landowner and hold him in contempt of court.”
On May 31, a judge ruled that Bossley was not in contempt of court but said he would have to stay 100 yards away from the survey crew when they came back. And now, the crew must give 30 days’ notice before going on the Bossley property.
