Speaker Jon Hansen (R-25/Dell Rapids) rode Summit Carbon Solutions’ carbon dioxide pipeline to power on a wave of landowner rebellion against corporate use of eminent domain, but Hansen paired his defense of property rights with a dubious critique of the carbon sequestration project as part of “the left’s climate agenda“. But now the Republican money men behind the CO2 pipeline are abandoning their green goals and pitching their stalled pipeline as a way to help frack more fossil fuels:
In a complete departure from plans made just a few years ago, Summit has been quick to adapt to the new political realities. Early this year, the company scrubbed the phrases “climate change” and “global warming” from its website.
Instead, a new page announces Summit’s plans to become “the critical CO2 supply artery for America’s most prolific oil and gas basins,” the Powder River Basin in Montana and Wyoming, the Bakken Formation spanning parts of North Dakota and Montana and the Permian Basin of Texas and New Mexico.
These regions will depend on CO2 to sustain oil and gas production in the future, Summit wrote, and the pipeline will support “America’s long-term goal of energy dominance” [Anika Jane Beamer, “Summit Sold Its Midwest Pipeline as a Carbon Solution. Now, It’ll Be Used for Fossil Fuels,” Inside Climate News, 2026.03.28].
Summit Carbon Solutions made a deal with North Dakota oil pumper Harold Hamm early in its project, but they said then they were just looking to trade carbon credits, not boost the dirty fossil fuel industry. Summit has now dropped that pretense.
We may now test Jon Hansen and his anti-carbon-pipeline friends for pretense. The Keystone pipelines—both the actual Keystone I that leaks Canadian tar sands oil across East River and the proposed but blocked Keystone XL that would have carried even more Alberta crude across West River— and the Dakota Access pipeline that transports Bakken oil from North Dakota through East River never prompted Hansen and his right-wing friends to the defense of property rights against out-of-state pipeliners, even though they used eminent domain for private gain just like the carbon pipeliners plan to do. Now that Summit Carbon Solutions has shed its green guise and wants to help pump more oil and gas out of the ground, will Hansen remain as steadfast in his professed concern for the property rights of the landowners whose land the carbon pipeliners will seize?
Jon Hansen has the usual problem. Is he a neo or a prag?
25 October, 2025
Speaker Jon Hansen
@SpeakerHansen
Update: The Governor’s Office approved giving this company $12M of SD taxpayer money.
https://southdakotasearchlight.com/2025/10/17/jet-fuel-companys-leader-calls-south-dakota-a-difficult-place-to-do-business/
This is another example of politicians and bureaucrats in the Governor’s Office of Economic Development getting duped by green-energy and other scams—abusing “economic development” programs to hand out our hard-earned tax dollars to out-of-state corporations.
This big corporate welfare will end when I am Governor.
Republicans became Earth haters in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union when the old Red Scare turned into the new Green Scare.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2014.06.008
Larry points out that Rep. Hansen was under the mistaken impression that CO2 pipelines were “green energy scams.” Somehow this became a mantra for some on the right, but, as with much their rhetoric it was based on fake history. The Green New Deal never included CO2 pipelines. What happened was that the biofuels and petrochemical industries lobbied for CO2 pipelines to be included in the federal government’s approach to CO2 reduction. It was NEVER a part of the Green New Deal.
I have always known that was the purpose of shipping compressed CO2 to places where, we were told, there were the proper geologic formations for “storage,” which were always the same places where shale deposits had been found… I thought it was a pretty good joke on the environmentalists. They CO2 would be pumped into the shale for “storage” and it would just happen to crack it and displace the oil. You’re just learning about this now?
Algebra, It was not “the environmentalsits” who were fooled. It was the politicians.