South Dakota is a place with a rural outlook on life. While one of the leading manufacturers of immense arena scoreboards, Daktronics, is located in small city Brookings and Ellsworth Air Force Base protects the country from its position northwest of Rapid City, most of the rest of the state is dedicated to agriculture. The people are hard-working and self-reliant by necessity. They are happy to adopt technological improvements that increase crop yields and make farming more successful. The corn they grow is not only feed for the premium beef enjoyed by Americans but also the feed stock for the ethanol plants fermenting the corn into a required gasoline additive.
Part of the ethanol production process also involves the production of gaseous CO2, as it does with any fermentation. Presently almost all of this benign gas is exhausted into the atmosphere. According to some researchers this CO2 is a major component of AGW, climate change, all 421 parts per million in the skies above. While there's controversy over the reality and importance of this belief, academic research says it is so and government implements and subsidizes programs advocated by academe and business as remedies.
Companies enthralled with the subsidized opportunity to obtain the CO2 from ethanol plants and moving it to a spot where it can be sequestered far beneath the surface are running into trouble because the thousands of miles of pipelines required to do this aren't permitted by South Dakota regulators and are unpopular with landowners. Navigator Heartland Greenway LLC's application for building CO2 pipelines in that state failed to get regulatory approval. The sane people in North Dakota have rejected the plans of Summit Carbon Solutions for a similar project.
Don't expect these CO2 pirates to give up easily. There are ways to get things done when big bucks are involved. Minnesota, Iowa and Nebraska are targets as well.
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Summit Carbon Solutions has announced that they've acquired 80% of the needed North Dakota easements for their 2000 mile project tying 32 ethanol plants to an underground storage site northwest of Bismarck, ND.
Summit's project appears to be limited to the movement of the liquified C02 from the ethanol plant to its ultimate destination, the deep permanent storage site in North Dakota. Originally scheduled for operation in 2024 the legalities of the land easements might have caused a delay. There's also been no mention of the facilities needed at each plant for compressing the CO2 gas into a liquid form, if construction has already taken place, who was or is responsible for it and how the liquid CO2 will be staged through the pipeline system.
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