Northeast Nebraska County Delivers Blow to Plans for Carbon Pipeline

by Paul Hammel (Nebraska Examiner) Stanton County denial would require Summit Carbon Solutions to reapply for conditional use permit -- A rural Nebraska county delivered a blow Tuesday to plans by an Iowa corporation to build a pipeline carrying carbon dioxide across the state.

On a 3-0 vote, the Stanton County Board denied a conditional use permit for Summit Carbon Solutions, which is seeking to build a CO2 pipeline from more than 50 ethanol plants in the Midwest to a sequestration site in North Dakota.

Stanton County Clerk Wanda Heermann said commissioners stated that they needed more information about the health risks and possible foreign ownership of the company and that they wanted to see more public education and consideration of alternative routes.

Summit, Heermann said, would have to reapply for a conditional use permit if it wants to cross the northeast Nebraska county.

No one testified for the project

“More than 90% of the landowners in Stanton County have signed voluntary easement agreements, demonstrating broad understanding and support of the project,” said spokeswoman Sabrina Ahmed Zenor.

Dakota County delays vote

Also Tuesday, the Dakota County Planning and Zoning Commission tabled until April a decision on whether to recommend approval of a county conditional use permit for Summit. Commissioners said they needed more information, according to Joe O’Neill, the county’s zoning administrator.

Last fall, Summit Carbon Solutions announced it was postponing its project until 2026 because of opposition to the $5.5 billion, 2,000-mile CO2 pipeline. It is the largest carbon pipeline being proposed in the region and would pass through Iowa, North and South Dakota and Minnesota, as well as Nebraska.

Proponents of corn-based ethanol have touted the plan to capture and sequester CO2 produced by ethanol plants as a way to make the fuel more environmentally friendly and ensure a market for the fuel into the future. Billions in federal funds have been set aside to help capture the greenhouse gases.

Nebraska has no state regulations concerning carbon pipelines, but counties that have zoning ordinances require companies to obtain conditional use permits to build in that county. READ MORE

Excerpt from Omaha World-Herald: uring my public service as director of the Nebraska Department of Agriculture, we sought out opportunities to position Nebraska agriculture to capture domestic and international markets for our crops and livestock.

In doing this, it was critical for our department to understand our customers, the consumers of our products in these markets, and oftentimes we found that many of these consumers held inaccurate impressions of Nebraska agriculture that we needed to dispel.

An example of this was the misguided belief that Nebraska farms are overly commercialized. By identifying this misunderstanding, we were able to share with consumers that 98% of Nebraska farms and ranches are operated by families; most of them generational families who have managed the same land to improve productivity and preserve and enhance natural resources.

By sharing our story, we were able to address the concerns and values of our customers and were able to influence their purchasing decisions. In fact, by taking this approach we saw our market share of beef exports increase from less than 4% to over 19% worldwide and, in Europe alone, we saw an increase from 5% to over 50%.

To maintain our edge, Nebraska’s producers need to constantly reevaluate consumer behavior and consistently refine our approach to build consumer confidence and to ensure that Nebraska products stay in demand around the world. This requires us to recognize that the factors influencing purchasing preferences evolve over time and require adaptation.

When the ethanol industry came to Nebraska it was an early pioneer in the renewable fuel space at a time when consumers were looking for alternatives to oil-based gasoline. Today, consumers of ethanol around the globe are looking for biofuels that have an increased mindfulness of environmental sustainability.

Carbon dioxide is emitted during the ethanol production process, and capturing it is not new to the ethanol industry. At a small scale, many of our facilities already capture this by-product to be used in food processing and on a larger scale, ethanol giant ADM itself has been utilizing carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) in some of their operations for over a decade.

By pairing CCS with ethanol production, our state will not only address these adjusting consumer purchasing preferences by creating low carbon ethanol, we also directly enable our ethanol to be converted into sustainable aviation fuel which is a massive and emerging market for Nebraska’s corn. READ MORE