Summit holds informational meeting for Floyd County carbon pipeline lateral line

By Travis Fischer, tkfischer@charlescitypress.com

The Floyd County Fairgrounds was the site of another lengthy gathering concerning carbon pipelines as the Iowa Utilities Board (IUB) and Summit Carbon Solutions held a public informational meeting on Tuesday evening, Aug. 8.

The meeting was required by state law as part of the process for Summit to adjust the previously announced plans to build a pipeline across Floyd County. The adjustment doesn’t change the existing route of the main pipeline, but introduces an additional 11-mile branch in Floyd County heading northward into Mitchell County, which will connect to the Absolute Energy ethanol plant near the Minnesota border.

A similar meeting was held earlier in the day for affected property owners in Mitchell County.

“This meeting is the first step in the process as required by Iowa code,” said Hunter Fors, who moderated the Floyd County meeting on behalf of the IUB.

During the meeting, Fors walked the audience through a summary of the permit process, detailing the legal rights of landowners on everything from surveys to easements to eminent domain.

Representatives from Summit – Vice President of Government Affairs Jake Ketzner, Chief Commercial Officer Jim Pirolli, and Chief Operating Officer Jimmy Powell – were also there to present information about their updated plans for the carbon pipeline.

The $5.5 billion project is designed to create a network of CO2 pipelines connecting more than 30 ethanol plants across five states. CO2 will be captured at the ethanol plants and compressed into a supercritical fluid state where it will be pushed through the pipeline to a sequestration site in North Dakota.

Under their current timeline, Summit intends to begin construction of the pipeline as early as 2024. To that end, the company is negotiating with landowners for 100-foot-wide easements, 50 feet of which will be permanent for the pipeline and the remainder a temporary easement for construction.

The first hour of the meeting covered the IUB and Summit’s informational portion of the evening, leaving the next two hours to be dominated by a Q&A session from the audience.

A line of landowners, both local and from out-of-the-area, offered questions and comments on just about every aspect of the project, from its long term financial viability to Summit’s legal obligations to how the property and the pipeline itself would be insured.

The most common topic for questions and criticisms centered on the pipeline’s safety, resulting in occasionally contentious and heated exchanges between the Summit representatives and the audience as the former attempted to assure the latter that the risk of a fatal incident outside of the immediate area of a pipeline leak was negligible.

“If there was a risk of that, then we would not be doing this,” said Pirolli.

Many in the audience referred to a 2020 pipeline rupture near Satartia, Mississippi, which reportedly caused an evacuation of 200 people, hospitalized 45, and disabled combustion engines in the surrounding area. With that scenario in mind, audience members brought up their concerns about the level of risk the pipeline presents to the area it covers and Summit’s position on providing training and equipment to area first responders in the event of an emergency.

While Summit representatives tried to assure the audience that its models do not demonstrate a risk to the population beyond a short distance of a potential pipeline break, their resistance to offering specifics about their internal studies left several of the questioners unsatisfied.

Many of the potentially impacted property owners in the area asked for the public release of Summit’s safety studies of specific points along the route. While Summit representatives offered to have private discussions about safety with individual landowners, they emphasized that it was not an industry standard nor was there a legal obligation to release that information publicly.

State Rep. Charley Thomson (R-Charles City), as one of the last audience members to step up for questions, did get some details out of the panel about the specifics of a “worst-case scenario” event, in which a CO2 concentration of 80,000 parts per million would be released into an environment before being dispersed.

“That’s measured in tens of feet, not thousands of feet,” said Powell.

With the audience filtering out and questioners no longer stepping up to the microphone, the meeting was officially declared closed at 9:06 p.m., though Summit representatives stayed behind for some time to continue private discussions with audience members.