Summit Carbon Solutions isn’t just rerouting its proposed carbon dioxide pipeline; it’s derouting, cutting 200 miles of its project in Iowa:
Summit Carbon Solutions announced today that it is refining portions of its proposed Iowa project footprint to focus on the strongest and most efficient path forward, helping accelerate progress toward construction and delivery of long-term economic opportunities for agriculture and rural communities.
The filing submitted to the Iowa Utilities Commission removes certain pipeline route segments, simplifying the overall project while maintaining the core infrastructure needed to move forward efficiently and responsibly.
The updated route reduces overall project complexity, with fewer impacted miles and fewer impacted landowners, allowing for a more focused and streamlined regulatory process. Summit will remove the proposed routes in Shelby, Pottawattamie, Montgomery, Adams, Page, Fremont, Mitchell, and Worth counties, while also reducing pipeline mileage in Crawford, Floyd, Sioux, and Dickinson counties. In total, the refinements will remove more than 400 landowners from the project footprint and reduce the overall scope of the project by approximately 200 miles.
The project will continue to work with a strong core group of ethanol facilities, including 27* in Iowa. At this time, the company will not pursue routes to Absolute Energy, POET Corning, POET Hanlontown, or Green Plains Shanandoah [Summit Carbon Solutions, press release, 2026.05.13].
…and dropping South Dakota, North Dakota, and Minnesota entirely. The Iowa developers say the three northern states “provide valuable optionality for future phases” (a string of words never uttered by any normal human interlocutor), but SCS’s focus now is to extend their route west through Nebraska into Wyoming, where they plan to sell their CO2 to oil drillers:
Now, Summit says its new plan is to instead attempt to obtain a pipeline route directly across the entire state of Nebraska, to an alternate underground CO2 waste dump site in Wyoming. The company will also switch focus from offering ethanol plants a way to improve their “carbon scores,” to “enhanced oil recovery” as a potential use for the captured CO2 – erasing whatever climate benefits the company and its ethanol plant partners are claiming from the project, if the CO2 will instead be utilized to extract and burn more oil [Mark Hefflinger, “Bold Statement Re: Summit Carbon Solutions’ Alternative Plan to Route Risky CO2 Pipeline Through Nebraska,” Bold Nebraska, 2026.05.13].
Summit dropped its green pretense earlier this year when it overhauled its website to indicate its interest in shipping CO2 to help frack in the Powder River Basin of Wyoming and Montana, the Bakken fields in North Dakota and Montana, and the Permian Basin in Texas.