At the recent Global CCS Institute APAC Forum in Adelaide, DNV’s Diane Labregere began her presentation on CO2 storage certification with a question: who in the audience would be comfortable having a CO2 storage site located not far from their home? Diane reports that most attendees, unsurprisingly, were comfortable with the idea (this was, after all, a room full of CCS professionals). But in her LinkedIn post on the event, she suggests that had she asked the same question in a different setting, the number of hands raised might have been a lot lower.
Earlier this year, The Economist ran a brilliantly titled story from Iowa: ‘An environmentalist, a landowner and a libertarian walk into a barn.’1 It reported on the story of Sherri Webb, whose 40 acres in Shelby County have been in her family for generations, and whose land sat in the path of the proposed Summit Carbon Solutions pipeline network. The pipeline network encompasses thousands of miles of CO2 pipeline connecting ethanol plants across Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota and South Dakota, with the captured CO2 ultimately transported to North Dakota for permanent underground storage.
The case for the project is partly environmental but also strongly economic: it could support ethanol producers’ access to lower-carbon fuel markets, help corn farmers, create construction work, and benefit from federal carbon-capture tax incentives. Summit has also suggested that captured CO2 could eventually supply enhanced oil recovery operations. As for the politics, opposition to the pipelines has created a coalition of people who would not normally find themselves on the same side (hence the article title). Environmentalists may have objections to CCS or pipelines; conservative rural landowners may be perfectly comfortable with oil and gas infrastructure but object fiercely to a private company being able to use eminent domain to put a CO2 pipeline across somebody’s family land; and suddenly bi-partisan politics start to look a little less black and white.
Landowners in opposition point to the 2020 Satartia, Mississippi CO2 pipeline rupture, in which people were poisoned following a release. Summit stresses that there have been no fatalities from such projects, but for communities being asked to host new CO2 infrastructure, the possibility of a release is clearly part of their assessment of the project.
Since The Economist published its story in April, Summit Carbon Solutions has redrawn its plans, removing around 200 miles of proposed pipeline and more than 400 landowners from the route – including Webb and her family’s land. The project continues, but in a substantially altered form. The original concept was a 2000+ mile network connecting 57 ethanol plants across five states, transporting the captured CO2 to storage in North Dakota. The revised plan is smaller, centred on 27 ethanol plants in Iowa, and would route the CO2 westwards towards Wyoming rather than North Dakota.
We know that technical safety is necessary for new forms of pipeline transport, but social licence encompasses much more than technical safety. The Iowa story demonstrates that you can have an impeccably engineered pipeline and still face legitimate questions about land rights, public benefit, and consent. The pipeline industry has decades of experience in designing, constructing, operating and maintaining critical infrastructure safely. However, the expansion of CCS means taking that expertise into communities that may have little familiarity with CO2 pipelines, and asking people to place considerable trust in the infrastructure being proposed. The September issue of World Pipelines showcases the technologies and practices that make pipelines safer and more reliable throughout their operating lives. Enjoy the issue.
