Garrick Moritz, editor
Everybody who has read our paper knows we’ve had a lot of stories about the Carbon Dioxide pipelines in the last two years. We did our first story about these pipelines back on Jan. 19, 2022. Since then, Carrie Moritz, Dave Baumeister (our County reporter) and I have all done multiple stories and we’ve published from SD Searchlight and SD News Watch as often as possible about these topics because I know it’s important to our readership in the Garretson Area.
On Tuesday, Oct. 17, I was invited to be a guest on South Dakota Public Broadcasting’s "In the Moment" with Lori Walsh. Walsh is one of my personal heroines of SD journalism, so to say I was super nervous about the interview is an understatement. If you want to give it a listen, go to https://listen.sdpb.org/in-the-moment (or https://listen.sdpb.org/show/in-the-moment/2023-10-17/exploring-the-carbon-capture-pipeline-debate-county-by-county).
Before I went on air I prepared a bunch of research on the stories we’d done and got my thoughts in order in notes before I did the show. I felt it would be worthwhile to give you a chance to read the thoughts that I didn’t have time to share in a fifteen-minute interview.
The first story we did on this issue was on Jan. 19, 2022 following the public meeting hosted by Navigator, hosted at the Garretson American Legion Post #23 dugout. There were 130 local residents and farmers. It was Tuesday noon on a workday, so super inconvenient for most people (especially a newspaper whose final deadlines are Tuesdays), but the Legion was full.
The project was 1,300 miles of underground pipeline. The main thrust of that story was how flat the company’s presentation fell with local residents and ag operators. They had an opportunity to win people over to their side and they failed fairly badly. They didn’t answer questions in an open forum, people had to line up to ask questions of engineers and reps who didn’t have the information they wanted. What these local residents and Ag operators heard at that meeting was that they should sign the lease and get paid, otherwise the casual threat of eminent domain was bandied about.
I’m sure you know this, but South Dakotans are a very independent kind of people, and folk don’t like being threatened.
About a dozen miles down the road from Garretson in Valley Springs, locals organized a meeting to get organized to oppose these pipelines. I went to the meeting and did a story about it.
From there we continued publishing stories as things continued to progress. Other news organizations around the state saw what we did and started to do likewise. South Dakota News Watch and SD Searchlight have also done some stellar coverage. Whenever either of those organizations has done a report, I’ve published them in my paper.
With that all under my belt, I got a fairly solid general working knowledge of the situation. As a journalist, you must be objective and fair, and not take sides on an issue. But when the facts speak for themselves, there isn’t much wiggle room. People were angry and afraid.
Summit Carbon Solutions and Navigator are companies brought into existence to spearhead this project. They did not exist before that time, and though they may have hired local employees and/or consultants and lawyers, they most certainly are not a locally and organically created business in South Dakota. They came from out of state interests and a have admitted under oath to having foreign investors such as the United Arab Emirates.
These companies wanted local farmers and landowners to sign leases that granted them use of their land into perpetuity for a one-time easement payment. These payments were several thousand dollars, but varied from plot to plot, place to place and person to person. The underlying message was, let us survey your land and accept this payment from us to use it or we’ll invoke eminent domain just as soon as our project is approved by the Public Utilities Commission. If you don’t let us onto your land, we’ll sue you. And if your county commissioners ban our pipelines, we’ll sue them, and that’s just what they did all across the state, at least in the case of Summit Carbon Solutions.
If you’re thinking this smells fairly rotten, then you’d be right. A one-time payment for perpetual (i.e., forever) use of property for the pipeline is just a pittance. Especially since these companies stood to make billions of dollars in tax credits on this project. This is to say nothing that if the pipeline was built and then shut down, any future company with the easement document could do whatever they wanted with it, and the landowner couldn’t do a thing as their rights would have already been signed away.
Say what you like about wind power generation, and it has its detractors, but those folks pay an annual rent to the farmer in question whose land they use and also, at least in our area of rural Minnehaha County, make sizable grants to local charities and community organizations for the betterment of the community.
These out of state companies had no plans to do that. Rather, it seems the plan was to gobble up that sweet tax credit cash on the backs of the people who actually own the land. Why they wanted an easement or lease rather than ownership, is because then they could avoid liability. All pipelines will eventually leak and need constant maintenance. Their stated plan was a shutoff station every 100 miles or so. How they think that would be enough to save lives in an emergency, I just cannot fathom. The industry safety video of a simulated leak I saw of a test in the United Kingdom was like a carbon dioxide bomb going off, and that was for a pipeline half the diameter of the one proposed and under much less PSI. Half a mile is really not safe enough and their initial proposals were only a few hundred feet from an occupied building.
They were asking people to risk their lives, the lives of their families, their livestock and livelihoods (because a concentrated carbon dioxide gas will kill your crops, wreck the airable soil and create carbonic acid in any open water), all for a one-time payment that if they didn’t take, they’d be sued and eminent domain used against them, before the PUC permit was even approved. And they wonder why people were so angry and afraid…
This is the kind of thing that crosses political boundaries. It doesn’t matter which flavor of politics you subscribe to, this is about rights of citizenship and property rights. Something that’s enshrined in the State and Federal constitutions.
This said, the groundswell of public opinion that happened is heartening to me. Here in Minnehaha County, one of the staunchest opponents to the project, Rick Bonander of Valley Springs, was elected to the Public Utilities Commission for Minnehaha County. The county commissioners increased setback requirements, although they were leaned on politically to not pass an outright ban by the Chair of the Republican Party of South Dakota at the time. Jeff Barth was the only commissioner that really stood up to that, and he left office shortly thereafter and made a brave but unsuccessful run to be elected to the State Public Utilities commission. However, this year, Minnehaha County did manage to pass setbacks and restrictions on the project that made it a bit safer. Many other counties did the same, and some passed outright bans. Counties were sued and landowners were sued. The police got involved. It got ugly, especially up in Brown and Spink counties.
These farmers and landowners across the state made the legislature and the state Public Utilities commissioners well aware of their anger and fear. They asked to be protected. They asked not to have their rights as landowners taken away for a project that was not only potentially very dangerous, but had questionable merit as being good for the environment in the first place.
SD Ethanol was a supporter of these projects and it’s likely that the wheels were well greased for them to be so. I suppose it could have been construed as a win/win for them, they get hooked up to the network to dispose of their carbon dioxide waste as well as monetary incentives. Meanwhile, SD Ethanol testifies before the legislature that it helps them go green, get a better taxation bracket and pass that savings along to the customer and producer. There was no guarantee however that they would lower their fuel prices or pay the farmer more for their corn.
North Dakota PUC’s decision was excellent, in my opinion, and it gave our PUC good precedent to stand on. If you’d have asked me a year ago if our PUC would have green lit Summit and Navigator projects in South Dakota, I’d be lying if I told you I thought they'd turn it down. I was very pleasantly surprised when they rejected them both. The entitles that own Summit and Navigator have donated a significant sum of money to high office holders' campaign funds in South Dakota, and usually that means that office holder will do what they want them to do.
I’d just gotten the news that Navigator had been unanimously voted down by SD PUC. I was going on errands, and ran into a local supporter of the anti-pipeline movement in SD. She did a little dance and cheer on main street Garretson. She said she’d been biting her nails and pacing all day waiting to hear how it went, until finally she had to walk away from her phone, radio and TV and get some fresh air and maybe do a little shopping at the Treasure Chest.
Another local landowner and excellent friend of the paper, Oran Sorenson, a former legislator, wasn’t an in initial fan of the project either. However, he told me that his son did sign and take the cash. Oran said the fellow he talked to was kind and courteous. To me that speaks that Navigator was at least savvy enough to realize you catch more flies with honey than vinegar.
I’ve heard of several local landowners and operators who did the same. Who can blame them? If you didn’t know, farming is expensive, and most famers don’t have the resources to fight this kind of thing. Cash up front is something I don’t know if I’d refuse myself. We’ve all got bills to pay.
Now that Navigator has, at least for now, ceased all their operations, Oran told me that he and his family are not going to cry any tears at all if it is never built, and are meanwhile happy to have taken their money. He’s not the only person I’ve heard make that comment either.
It’s telling that in 2022 the only thing the legislature passed on this issue was to make sure they had the rights to tax this pipeline, nothing was passed about protecting the people or the landowners in question. The majority of Legislators didn’t come out strongly against these pipelines until after the session was over in 2022 and there was a lot of talk and precious little action in 2023. Giving credit where credit is due, Tom Pishke and Jon Hansen have both publicly voiced strong support for landowners’ rights, but committee hearings regarding reforming property rights of the landowner did not get the needle moved. When the rubber met the road, the legislature failed the landowner so far on this issue.
But this issue faced enough public backlash that the Public Utilities Commission denied the proposals. Or maybe they had what I like to call the Mel Brooks in Blazing Saddles political reaction, “Holy underwear! Innocent women and children at risk! We’ve got to protect our phoney-baloney jobs gentlemen, harrumph, I say, harrumph!”
What’s next? People know that this isn’t going away. They’re going to come back at this and I know that the people who have opposed it are gearing up for another battle. I’ve watched the number of signs saying “No eminent domain for private gain!” and “No Carbon Pipelines! Stand up for Landowner rights!” grow constantly, now more than ever before.
In June of 2024 the agency of Pipelines and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, PHMSA, a, part of the Department of Transportation, will be publishing a notice of proposed rulemaking to set new standards for the construction, operation and maintenance of CO2 pipelines. This does not set new rules, but it will give a heads up to what the new rules may be. They did this because in 2022, groups concerned about safety like the one right here in SD, wanted better regulations on the books. This is directly from the Congressional Research Service, in a document prepared for members and committees of congress.
Hopefully this means we have better regulations on the horizon. More than one person has speculated that might be the reason that Summit and Navigator pushed so hard to get these pipelines approved and constructed quickly here in South and North Dakota, so that they could get these projects grandfathered in rather than have to comply with more strict regulation.
Whatever the case may be, you can bet I’ll be watching and reporting.
