Senator Marion Michael Rounds told the Sioux Falls Rotary Club at lunch yesterday that Summit Carbon Solutions made a bad decision when it plowed through South Dakota farmland to survey its proposed carbon dioxide pipeline route. But don’t think you have a friend in Washington against the land-grabbers, pipeline opponents. Senator Rounds only thinks his Iowa Republican friends running Summit made a public relations mistake:
“[Summit Carbon] had some people in there basically blowing their way through, and that irritated a whole lot of people, and I don’t blame them,” Rounds told Rotarian Tony Nour, during Rotary Club of Downtown Sioux Falls’ weekly meeting on Monday.
…Rounds told the club members he had since spoken with representatives of Summit Carbon “to hear their side of the story.” The South Dakota senator said he brought up the unresolved public relations problem to the company in this conversation.
“You have really created a black eye for yourself because of the method in which you went after landowners, trying to get them to allow for their property to be accessed,” Rounds said, paraphrasing his comments to the company. “I said that part is now one you have to solve because the public relations on that are not good for you” [Dominik Dausch and Annie Todd, “Senator Mike Rounds: Summit Carbon Gave Itself a ‘Black Eye’ After Controversial Land Surveys,” Sioux Falls Argus Leader, 2023.08.07].
PR be darned, Senator Rounds says Summit Carbon Solutions has the legal right to take private property for its profit:
Rounds also provided his opinion on the issue of eminent domain, which is the process Summit Carbon could use to acquire land easements from uncooperative landowners against their wishes.
…”You have some folks that talk about whether or not this should be identified as far as a taking and whether or not you can legally come in and say, ‘I get to put this pipeline on your land,'” Rounds said. “That’s going to be decided in the courts where it should be.
…Rounds was the most recent voice to renew the topic Monday after giving his “message to landowners”: “I think carbon is a commodity.”
“I think the courts will tell you that there is, through this public pipeline … it is an allowed item to be transported, and they can use a right of way,” Rounds said. “Now, that’s my opinion. I think the courts are going to go that direction, but the safety is totally on the company” [Dausch and Todd, 2023.08.07].
PR doesn’t win court cases, and Senator Rounds is making the case that his Iowa Republican friends have a greater claim to South Dakota farmland than the South Dakota owners farming that land.
They’ll make CO2 a commodity even though it isn’t by trading it on the carbon markets.
Rounds will be on the boondoggle wagon for sure. It’s unbelievable how dumb these pipelines are. How much _extra water_ and energy will be wasted operating these things.
Also, they will eventually use this for enhanced oil recovery. Mark my words.
Just like opening CRP to haying sometimes.
Sorry (not really) for the triple posts but wouldn’t surprise me if they use it for oil recovery WHILE pumping CO2 underground. CO2 sequestered, Oil pumped out. Now I’ll shut up.
No, Rounds ain’t ever going to stand up for South Dakotans when a well-funded out-of-state company says it’s going to be carrying a “commodity.” Rounds, of course, was probably the loudest supporter of the “garbage is a commodity” caucus in the SD Legislature in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He was all in favor of burying the South Dakota under New Jersey’s garbage because he believed garbage, rather than being putrescent waste needing regulation, was just something that could be carried dripping toxins and disease across half the country to be disposed of in mega-landfills in South Dakota’s prairie. Back then Rounds’ sister worked in “public relations” for the company that wanted to use South Dakota as the nation’s waste dump. For Rounds, it was all about “public relations.” He didn’t care about the people that would be left living near the piles of garbage. Well, the court cases for SDDS went on and on for about 15 years after the citizens put an end to the garbage company’s plans. Rounds, rather than continue fighting the company, paid them off with taxpayer money. You gotta wonder if Rounds has someone getting money from Summit Carbon. The only commodity back then, as now, apparently, is politicians who are willing to sell themselves to the highest bidder.
Donald Pay I find you 100% correct; the COMMODITY becomes the politician (Rounds) or whoever agrees with the CORPORATION shelling the mney to said politician to get them in favor. Never statesmen-always politician (for sale).
sx123-you also seem right on as to future plans for oil extraction use with ‘captured’ carbon!
No pipeline? No problem!
How are Mr. Rounds’ comments not signs he’s done with politics? He threw Herr Trump into the ash heap, too so unless he has a girlfriend stashed in DC Fort Pierre will be his final resting place.
Welcome to The Upper Plains of America newly resettled house and landowners. Enjoy your land, take care of it, and remember that true ownership is just a fanciful notion in South Dakota; your new complex state of legalities and restrictions.
It’s what’s called “freedom” where you now live. Don’t you feel as free as Spirit in “Reservation Dogs” wearing a deerskin loincloth and peeing in a bus depot toilet stall?
One element of this that I do not completely understand is are farmers/land owners saying, “absolutely no,” or is this an issue that Summit Carbon Solutions is not willing to pay the price (fair price?) the farmers/land owners need to be made OK? Everyone has a price.
Shouldn’t securing land rights have come WAY earlier in this process?
“Shouldn’t securing land rights have come WAY earlier in this process?”
As I mentioned at the Brown County Commission meeting a couple of weeks ago, eminent domain for the benefit of private companies is nothing new. It goes back at least to early-20th century rural electrification. People didn’t care so much when there was a perceived public benefit and less risk of massive poisoning (cf. Lake Nyos Incident, ca August 1986).
Now these carbon sequestration projects are on an artificial deadline thanks almost entirely to the Federal Government’s involvement in subsidizing them and the entire basis for declaring carbon capture pipelines to be “common carriers” has a lot of people (including myself) scratching their heads over just how that determination gets made, if not by PUC fiat. If you look at what state law actually says about eminent domain, PUC fiat seems to be just how that determination has always been made.
The solution to this problem is going to have to come from where the problem originated: The legislature. There seems to be no inclination towards a special session on the part of the senate. And here we are.
Ryan Kelly; you are SOOOOO right! The legislature has to be the determining body that decides what a “commodity” or “needed public use” is to be;;; BUT, and here’s the GOP rub-if the legislature isn’t called into session by a governess that wants nothing to change, is secretly behind the corporate concept of making $$$ from the project or legislative leaders of the SD House/Senate don’t want the issue debated and cleared up, we will be stuck with the three-member PUC making the decision that affects ALL the landowners involved.
Gov. Noem made a ‘statement’ that she was on the side of the affected landowners (coming from an Ag background she politically had to, eh) but her heart and aspirations lie in the good will and $$$ donations by the 2 corporations (and more to come) struggling at the moment with the PUC-not the People!
Tommie Lee Jones on eminent domain….. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77ZuwtX3B80
woke up a can of whoop ass on federal agent in Lonesome Dove. Crude but effective.
Well, carbon dioxide is a commodity. And since this appears to be a use that is crossing state lines, it would be “interstate commerce,” which has special federal status which is difficult to get around. So that part of the argument is going nowhere. I’m not familiar anymore with what federal standards are, if there are any, for safety of carbon dioxide pipelines, especially ones of this length and complexity. A year or two year moratorium on PUC action on CO2 pipelines until safety concerns can be addressed through a study and rulemaking might be a way to deal with it.
To the “carbon dioxide is a commodity” crowd:
Carbon dioxide, in the form it would take for sequestration and long-term storage, has one and only one industrial use: as fracking fluid for enhanced petroleum recovery.
So, the Biden administration is subsidizing a “commodity” whose only use is to help make more money and profit for an industry Biden campaigned on putting out of business! 😕
It is a commodity. If you drink carbonated beverages you are consuming it. If you brew your own carbonated beverages at home (so you aren’t filling the landfills with plastic bottles) you are buying cartridges of compressed CO2 to do it with. That’s what “seltzer” is: CO2.
Again, for the “It’s a commodity” crowd:
Carbon dioxide has industrial uses. BUT the liquified carbon dioxide they are planning on *permanently* storing in salt caverns is neither traded on any commodity exchanges, nor can it be used in carbonating drinks. It’s like calling caffeine a “drug” because you can get it over the counter in pill form. Yeah, that is considered a drug by the FDA, but your morning coffee and the cola you had with your dinner aren’t considered drugs even though they have that exact same chemical in them. Such are our bureaucracies nowadays.
In order to consider *sequestered* carbon dioxide a commodity, you have to completely redefine “commodity.” And converting it from its sequestered form into something industrially useable in anything other than enhanced fracking would completely defeat the purpose of “lowering carbon footprints.”