Last call to speak up about Summit’s CO2 pipeline

The Iowa Utilities Board is fast-tracking Summit’s CO2 pipeline proposal, setting Aug. 22 as the start of their hearing date. The last date for impacted Iowans to intervene on the docket is July 10, a mere two weeks from now.

These sudden deadlines reject the IUB’s previous Feb. 17 filing on the schedule, which the IUB had determined after careful consideration of interested parties. “The carbon dioxide pipelines present unique factual and legal issues unprecedented in Iowa or in the United States,” wrote the Sierra Club’s Wally Taylor to the IUB. “It is important to do it right, rather than do it quickly.”

And the Farm Bureau asked that the IUB “avoid holding the hearing at a time of year which is ordinarily busy for farming activities,” providing a helpful chart that showed the harvest period stretching from September to November. However, a start date of Aug. 22 will guarantee that the hearing will overlap with harvest time, since the process is projected to take several months. Landowners of over a thousand parcels have refused to sign voluntary easements with Summit and are facing the prospect of having their property condemned. Josh Byrnes, a member of last year’s IUB, objected to the idea of holding the hearing in the fall, writing that, “We are forcing farmers affected by the proposed route to choose between their land and their livelihood.”

The sudden reversal of the IUB’s earlier indications comes on the heels of Gov. Kim Reynold’s move to replace two of the three board members last April. Indeed, the new timeline makes it unlikely that the two new members of the board would be able to read the thousands of pages of heartfelt letters, legal motions and documents that have been filed on the Summit docket since August of 2021. There are simply not enough hours in the day.

Why the rush? Why now?

The IUB’s abrupt deadline comes, perhaps not coincidentally, just after federal officials have begun to acknowledge activists’ concerns about the safety of the proposed pipelines. On May 31, representatives from PHMSA (Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration), the federal agency charged with regulation of CO2 pipelines, traveled to Des Moines to listen to us. Indeed, hundreds of Iowans participated. Our request was simple: place a moratorium on the build-out of new CO2 pipelines until PHMSA has completed their current research on CO2 plume modeling (research undertaken in response to the dangerous and unforeseen consequences of the CO2 pipeline rupture that happened at Satartia in 2020). That new research — conducted by independent academic scientists and, importantly, not led by industry — is projected to be completed by the fall of 2024.

Everyone with common sense recognizes that CO2 pipelines should not be built at such an unprecedented scale through Iowa — and unconscionably close to our schools, churches, businesses, homes, and farms — until we know more about their impact on our community’s safety and well-being.

The IUB has decided that safety falls under the purview of PHMSA, but they are unwilling to wait until PHMSA has completed the necessary research. The pipeline companies want to build now; taking the time to properly conduct the scientific modeling of a CO2 pipeline rupture is not in their financial interest.

What value, then, are our lives? We have two more weeks to speak up.

Jessica Wiskus lives in rural Lisbon.