This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center.
One night in 2021, a farmer Steve Kenkel has known since childhood gave him a call. The farmer had news: there was going to be a CO2 pipeline coming through his property in Shelby County, Iowa.
Kenkel has lived in Shelby County for his whole life, on a farm that has been in his family for five generations. He’d been a county supervisor for years. He had no idea what his neighbor was talking about.
He called his fellow supervisors and his county auditor, who also were in the dark. A few days later, the Board of Supervisors got a letter from a company called Summit Carbon Solutions, informing them about a public hearing on the project.
“My neighbor got [the news] first,” Kenkel said. “At the time, it kind of threw a red flag up for me—but nothing like it does now.”
That phone call from a childhood friend would propel Kenkel into years of unexpected activism, and put his name on a lawsuit filed by a company founded by one of the most powerful men in Iowa. Summit Carbon Solutions is proposing to take advantage of tax credits, juiced up by the Biden administration to fight climate change as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, to pipe carbon dioxide from ethanol plants across the Midwest to be stored underground in North Dakota. Some of the men behind the project have close ties with powers in statehouses across the Midwest, and have seemed to some to be using those ties to seize land and push through a project that many people don’t want.
The opposition has leaked into national politics. In early October, former candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. released a video onto Twitter/X, calling the Summit project “Kamala’s carbon pipeline climate scam.” Narrated by RFK Jr., the nearly half-hour-long video interviews affected farmers throughout Iowa, including Kenkel, in opposition to the project.
“Let’s get President Trump back in the White House and me to Washington so we can stop this massive boondoggle,” a post accompanying the video reads. The post does not mention that Bruce Rastetter, the founder of Summit and Republican kingmaker, endorsed Donald Trump earlier this year. Nor does it mention the project’s financial backing from Harold Hamm, an oil tycoon who is also one of Donald Trump’s most fervent champions, or its support from North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, whom Trump said last month he will nominate to lead the Department of the Interior and act as his energy czar. Last year, Burgum said he had “every expectation that [the] pipeline is going to be approved in North Dakota.”
The Summit pipeline is a curious Frankenstein monster of big-climate-tech promises, oil industry advocacy, government tax credits, and powerful agricultural interests. The project has united landowners across five states and all along the political spectrum in opposition, from those who volunteer with the Sierra Club for climate action to those who believe the “radical environmental movement” threatens American lifestyles.
On its website, Summit maintains a careful neutrality on climate. A primer on the project’s benefits carefully tucks the environmental pluses of the proposed pipeline—including the fact that it would store 18 million tons of CO2 underground each year—under lists of statistics about its economic and agricultural benefits.
“We're an ag company building an infrastructure project,” Lee Blank, Summit’s CEO, told Drilled. “This is based on making US agriculture a better place, and a stronger place for generations to come. And the ethanol industry is a major part of that.”
Some climate advocates say carbon capture projects like Summit are crucial climate solutions. Others say that it’s simply a way to pay polluters and extend the lifeline of technologies we can no longer rely on.
“The longer we use fossil fuels, the less time we actually have to do something that respects the rights of future generations to inherit a habitable planet,” said Iowa resident Carolyn Raffensperger, a lawyer and the executive director of the Science and Environmental Health Network. “When I think about carbon capture and storage—which is one of the most expensive [solutions], is funded by the public, and pays the polluter—it is actually delaying meaningful action.”
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I first met Kenkel at an August organizing meeting at one of the 29 counties in Iowa where Summit is proposing to build its pipeline project. The sun was setting golden-perfect over endless rows of vibrant green corn just outside the town of Guthrie Center (population: 1,605). A neighbor’s calf had escaped its fence and was wandering dangerously close to the road as I pulled into the parking lot.
The cavernous meeting hall—located on Guthrie County’s fairground complex—was filled with people sitting on folding chairs listening raptly to Jess Mazour, an organizer with the Sierra Club. Mazour, whose parents live near Guthrie County, is a familiar face to many of the landowners involved in the fight against Summit. Her presentation is tight and organized, the Sierra Club’s messaging honed after nearly three years of public meetings in this rural county.
Summit once claimed that their pipeline will help solve climate change, Mazour told the crowd—but, “whether you believe in climate change or not,” she said, it’s not true. Instead, her presentation portrayed a company looking to transport large amounts of CO2 across the state for its own profit, and one that could seize land from unwilling farmers. Mazour tells the room about an accident in Satartia, Mississippi in early 2020, which sent almost 50 people to the hospital after a rupture in a nearby CO2 pipeline released a cloud of noxious gas.
“[This is] the only issue in the state that cuts across party lines like this, or any demographic, whether you're Republican, Democrat, Independent, man, woman, young, old, rural, urban—people are opposed to using eminent domain for the project,” Mazour said.
A little over a month before the meeting, the Iowa Utilities Commission (IUC) had approved a permit allowing the company to move forward with plans to construct nearly 700 miles of pipeline through Iowa—and letting it use eminent domain to build on the property of reluctant landowners, an idea that clearly animated those in the room. Some of the farmers and landowners in attendance, who helped Mazour answer questions after her presentation, had been pushing against the pipeline crossing their property for years, but the room was also filled with newcomers, drawn in by word of mouth about the big industrial project making waves in their communities.
In a statement emailed to Drilled, Summit’s spokesperson said that it has signed easement agreements with more than 2,600 landowners in the five states where it is planning to route the pipeline, and that it has secured voluntary easements on 75% of its route in Iowa. “We also recognize that eminent domain is a concern for some, but we remain focused on achieving voluntary agreements wherever possible, fostering collaboration with landowners and communities across the route,” the spokesperson wrote.
Kelly Nieuwenhuis, a farmer in northwest Iowa and a 20-year veteran of the ethanol industry, has no concerns about letting Summit cross his land.
“In our area, roughly 80 percent of landowners have signed easements,” he told Drilled. “The situation is that we have the loud minority and the silent majority. People that are supportive of it, for the most part, don't want to be heckled, or don't want to have to deal with negative people.”
If supporters like Nieuwenhuis are the majority, the minority is certainly very loud. A Des Moines Register poll conducted last year measured opposition to using eminent domain for building carbon capture pipelines at 78%. Nearly 75% of impacted counties (about half the counties in Iowa), meanwhile, have lodged complaints or opposition about carbon capture pipelines. In November, South Dakotans soundly rejected a ballot measure that would have upheld a pro-CO2 pipeline law passed by the legislature earlier this year, despite the ethanol industry pouring millions into pro-ballot advertising.
Kenkel figured he had a responsibility to try and protect Shelby County residents from something that could potentially pose a danger. He was frustrated, he said, by the company’s plans to route the pipeline close to the edge of the 400-person town of Earling, cutting off any possibility for the town to safely expand. Summit insists the two can coexist.
“Pipelines and communities have coexisted safely for decades, even in areas of significant growth,” Summit’s spokesperson told Drilled. “There is no evidence to suggest that the presence of a pipeline deters expansion.”
In the fall of 2022, Shelby County held three public meetings to discuss proposed ordinances that would limit where CO2 pipelines could run. Kenkel said that Summit officials attended all three meetings on the proposed ordinances and voiced no verbal or written objections. In November, the county passed the ordinance, which would restrict the pipeline from running near facilities like hospitals and schools.
Two weeks after the ordinance was passed, Shelby County and Steve Kenkel were named in a lawsuit filed by Summit, alleging that federal and state regulations overruled the county’s right to determine where the pipeline should run. To date, Summit has sued five other counties in Iowa for passing similar ordinances. In Shelby County’s case, a judge ruled in favor of Summit in December of 2023; the county appealed, and the case is currently being heard in the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Summit did not respond to questions about whether Kenkel’s recollection on the Shelby County meetings were correct. But the company’s spokesperson told Drilled in a statement that it followed a process created by the Iowa Utilities Commission to route the pipeline. “We value the role of local leaders in this process and remain committed to maintaining open and transparent communication throughout the project,” the spokesperson wrote.
Blank, the CEO, said that the company’s emphasis on community engagement has shifted since the project started.
“I grew up on an Iowa farm, so I understand exactly what the farmer thinks about his acre,” Blank said. “That engagement, that transparency, that willingness to chat openly with the landowner about what we're going to do and how we're going to do it, that partnership with the small communities that we are around, and we'll be doing business in—those are things that we're really, in my opinion, doing a really good job of today. I think we maybe could have started that a little bit earlier.”
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The proposed map of the Summit project shows lines of pipeline snaking through Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota, ending at terminals in North Dakota with branches reaching into the western and southern edges of Minnesota. When completed, the project would capture carbon dioxide from ethanol plants around the region and transport it to be stored underground in North Dakota.
For a time, Summit had company. In 2021 a company called Navigator—supported in part by oil and ethanol giant Valero—announced plans to build 1,200 miles of CO2 pipeline across Iowa and neighboring states. A smaller project also announced in 2021—owned by Wolf Carbon Solutions, which partnered with agricultural giant Archer Daniels Midland—would have also piped CO2 from Iowa to store in Illinois.
But late last year, Navigator canceled its project, while Wolf Carbon Solutions withdrew its permit application. In a statement, Navigator cited the “unpredictable nature of the regulatory and government processes involved” as the reason for killing the project. Activists and landowners have claimed victory after sustained pressure on the company.
Summit is still moving forward. Since the demise of the Navigator pipeline, Valero has said it would ship CO2 from its plants on Summit’s pipelines, and Summit has purchased easements from Navigator in Iowa.
The project has faced significant hurdles throughout the Midwest. The company originally said the pipeline would be operational by this year, but at a conference in early August, an executive said that the project could be completed as late as 2027. A couple weeks later, the South Dakota Supreme Court ruled in a case brought by landowners that Summit had not yet proven that it can qualify as a “common carrier.” In late October, the Court rejected Summit’s bid to reconsider its decision, meaning that the company cannot use eminent domain to seize land in the state.
The longevity of Summit’s pipeline plans is probably partly attributable to the political power of the men behind it. Summit Carbon Solutions was co-founded by Bruce Rastetter, an agribusiness kingpin and one of the most important political figures in Iowa. Rastetter has repeatedly donated to politicians involved in green lighting the pipeline’s progress, including Gov. Kim Reynolds. (Anti-pipeline advocates point out that the final approval for the pipeline’s permit happened only after Gov. Reynolds, whose reelection campaigns have taken $160,000 from Rastetter since 2015, replaced two IUC members in 2023. Reynolds’s office has denied that the IUC replacements had anything to do with Summit.)
In 2022, Continental Resources, the company owned by oil magnate Harold Hamm, invested $250 million in Summit. The partnership was announced at a splashy event at the Tharaldson Ethanol plant in North Dakota, owned by Gary Tharaldson, the wealthiest man in the state. (Burgum gave a speech; the next year, Continental Resources donated $250,000 to a PAC supporting his failed bid for President, while Tharaldson gave $1 million.) In mid-November—one day after Trump announced he would tap Burgum to act as the country’s energy czar—North Dakota’s Public Utilities Commission handed Summit a major win by approving its route through the state.
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The idea of carbon capture and storage is one that—curiously for a climate solution—comes from the oil and gas industry. Oil and gas producers have long used carbon dioxide, mostly from natural sources deep underground, as a tool to extract more oil. The U.S. currently has around 5,000 miles of CO2 pipelines that work to help companies pull more oil out of the ground, a technique called “enhanced oil recovery,” or EOR.
In practice, using carbon capture and storage to drive down emissions has proven tricky. Capturing carbon from the dirtiest facilities is exorbitantly expensive, while the handful of facilities in operation have had a number of high-profile failures. Still, governments and private industries have thrown their weight behind the technology as a climate solution; the Global Carbon Capture Institute has logged more than 351 projects in development around the world. In the U.S., the Inflation Reduction Act substantially raised tax credits for carbon capture, making it economically much more feasible to build out pipelines and storage facilities. It’s still a risky proposition for companies like Summit, which is planning to build out huge stretches of infrastructure to store a marketable product—CO2—underground, where, in theory, nobody will use it.
The International Energy Agency, the world’s leading energy analysis body, states that carbon capture and storage will be essential over the coming decades to help reduce the carbon footprint of hard-to-abate industries, like steelmaking. The question that remains is how much we should be relying on the technology to reduce fossil fuel emissions: whether or not it’s a better idea to build sparingly for those industries that need it, or if we should go full speed ahead on carbon capture for all, creating new infrastructure that could potentially help extend the use of dirty fuel sources in a net-zero world.
Where ethanol fits into the carbon capture picture is a little murky. The CO2 produced in the ethanol fermentation process is much cleaner than what’s made at a coal plant or other fossil fuel facility, making the rate of capture success higher and the process much cheaper. (A quarter of ethanol plants in the U.S. currently sell captured CO2 from their operations to beverage companies, dry ice producers, and other industries.)
Most US ethanol is mixed with gasoline to be used in cars. Despite Trump’s pledge to roll back EV tax credits in the US, major automakers are still spending big to transition their fleets to electric—possibly leaving gas behind in the not-so-distant future. The question is what comes next for ethanol.
“There are people who think corn starch and corn grain ethanol is going to continue to be a part of how we make the low carbon fuels of the future,” said Daniel Sanchez, an assistant professor at the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California-Berkeley and an advisor at carbon removal company Carbon Direct. “And there are people who don't think that at all.”
Climate advocates have long pointed out that corn-based ethanol is exponentially less efficient as an energy source than solar or wind. Last year, more than 200 science faculty at 31 colleges and universities across Iowa signed a statement noting that a “one-acre solar farm produces as much energy as 100 acres of corn-based ethanol.” There are currently tens of millions of acres of corn going toward ethanol production in the U.S., which has an impact on soil, water, and chemical usage as well as emissions.
The ethanol industry has been pushing its product as something that could become the basis for other sorts of alternative fuel economies, like fuel to power greener aircraft, in the near future. Branding ethanol as the net-zero fuel of the future would be substantially helped by a technology that captures its carbon emissions. Backers of the Summit project have said that it would be “nearly impossible” for U.S. corn ethanol to meet qualifications for sustainable aviation fuel use without capturing its emissions.
Nieuwenhuis sat on the board of an ethanol plant in Sioux County, Iowa, for several years—one of the more than 50 ethanol plants in the state that would feed CO2 to the pipeline. He said that sustainable aviation fuel would be “mind-boggling” for the industry.
“It's a huge opportunity, but we won't qualify unless we lower our carbon intensity scores,” he said.
For some climate policy experts, ethanol’s eventual role in the country’s clean energy future doesn’t matter: what’s important is the buildout of the pipelines themselves.
“If you've got a cheap source that builds out a large trunk line CO2 pipeline, and that pipeline passes next to a hard-to-abate source—maybe it’s a cement plant, or something like that—you de-risked an important part of making that cement plant eligible for CCS,” John Thompson, the Technology and Markets Director at Clean Air Task Force said. In other words, Summit putting in the work to build out all that infrastructure could make it easier for other industries to connect their own pipelines.
The act of producing ethanol is an energy-intensive practice. A project like Summit would only capture emissions directly from ethanol’s fermentation. Without powering ethanol plants using clean sources of energy, the ethanol plants hooked up to the pipeline would still release about 7 million metric tons of CO2 each year, according to figures compiled by investigative newsroom South Dakota Searchlight.
“There's a big fight about whether or not ethanol with carbon capture counts as carbon removal,” Sanchez said. (A 2022 report from the Renewable Fuels Association, an industry group, found that ethanol could theoretically create net-negative emissions if carbon capture is combined with other strategies, including using renewable energy to power ethanol facilities.)
Then there’s the enthusiastic support that carbon capture has gotten from the fossil fuel industry. In recent years, oil majors have aggressively lobbied for carbon capture and storage as a climate solution. While there’s a few instances of ethanol being used for enhanced oil recovery, ethanol plants in the Midwest are usually far enough away from oilfields that using their captured CO2 was an overly expensive proposition—especially before the Inflation Reduction Act increased the tax credit for carbon captured and used for enhanced oil recovery.
Using ethanol for EOR has been touted by some groups as a way to get the nation’s carbon capture infrastructure up and running. In 2018, researchers from Princeton University released a peer-reviewed study proposing a pipeline network to pump carbon captured from ethanol plants in the Midwest to oilfields in West Texas in order to jumpstart the country’s carbon capture infrastructure. The paper was partly supported by Princeton’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative, a BP-funded center that has been a leader in pushing for increased carbon capture infrastructure. The lead researcher on the paper is now leading climate policy at Occidental Petroleum.
The promise of enhanced oil recovery could explain why Hamm, who harnessed fracking technology to unleash an oil boom in North Dakota’s Bakken in the late 2000s, is so heavily involved in the Summit project. In North Dakota, the country’s third-largest oil and gas producing state, the oil and gas industry generates billions of dollars in tax revenues each year. In April, North Dakota’s top oil and gas regulator warned that without importing CO2 from outside states, production in the Bakken could go into “terminal decline.” Governor Burgum—Trump’s energy czar nominee—has also called enhanced oil recovery carbon capture’s “biggest prize.”
Currently, US tax credits for carbon capture are structured to incentivize permanent storage: producers can earn $85/metric ton for CO2 that is geologically sequestered, versus $60/metric ton for CO2 used in enhanced oil recovery. Both Sanchez and Thompson told me they doubt that enhanced oil recovery will make economic sense for a project like Summit. But Reuters reported in March that the company said in regulatory filings to the IUC that it “does not ultimately control” whether or not potential customers use the CO2 for EOR.
“Our agreements with our partners are for permanent storage, and the majority of CO2 volume will be safely and permanently stored in North Dakota via Class VI injection wells,” Summit said in a statement. “No one has approached Summit about using our CO2 for enhanced oil recovery (EOR). Additionally, excess capacity will be available to support next-generation fuels like e-SAF and green methanol, as well as uses in water treatment, food processing, and dry ice production, driving regional economic growth.”
In an interview, Blank told Drilled that while the pipeline’s model was built around permanent sequestration over the 12 years covered by the tax credits, in the future, “we can take the CO2 off of the system for commercial use in the event that we would like to do that, or the economics would allow us to do that.”
The North Dakota oil and gas industry seems to be at least publicly touting CO2 capture as an accessory to oil. A Continental Resources executive included the Summit pipeline in a presentation titled “Unconventional EOR: The Size of the Prize in The Williston Basin” at a state oil and gas conference in May. At the same conference, Hamm and Rastetter were interviewed together in a session titled “Carbon Management: A Tool for Energy.”
In response to a question about enhanced oil recovery, Rastetter laid out plans for storing CO2 underground in North Dakota, saying that “having that resource brought to the state and developed in the state can lead to things down the road.” However, he also emphasized that there were no current plans for Summit to provide EOR in North Dakota.
“Today…the best source and the best revenue for us to make this work on an expensive project is direct sequestration,” Rastetter said.
The economics of enhanced oil recovery “[vary] over time,” said David Schlissel, director of resource planning analysis for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. Schlissel pointed out that if the price of oil rises, using the CO2 captured by projects like Summit for EOR may be more profitable than just keeping it underground, even with a hefty tax credit for permanent storage.
“Price of oil goes up, your CO2 is more valuable, right? You're playing the market,” Schlissel said. “Makes sense why they're cagey about it, because there could be a time in the future when selling it would be a good idea.”
There are other signs that the oil industry wants this project to go through. In late August, the American Petroleum Institute, the oil and gas industry’s main lobbying arm, filed a statement with the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission in support of Summit’s proposed route through that state.
“Almost all Americans agree we should be reducing emissions in all our operations,” API CEO Mike Sommers said on a guest spot on an Iowan radio station in July. “We have a long history of doing this safely and responsibly [with carbon capture].” IEEFA’s research notes that to date, no existing carbon capture project has ever captured emissions at the rate close to what the industry claims is standard.
Ultimately, for experts like Thompson who advocate for carbon capture as a climate solution, capturing emissions from polluting industries needs to begin as quickly as possible in order to keep warming from reaching catastrophic levels.
“We expect industrial plants to use modern pollution control equipment,” Thompson said. “Ethanol plants are no different. Carbon capture is a proven approach that cost-effectively removes CO2 from corn fermentation. If an ethanol plant is operating today, it should have the best pollution control equipment available, including carbon capture….Society may or may not opt for a different use of corn at some future date. But that consideration isn't relevant. If an ethanol plant operates today, it needs carbon capture.”
Others see a larger issue with how the technology rewards polluting industries—and the way it opens the door for even more oil production.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if somewhere down the road, future generations consider using captured CO2 for EOR as a crime against humanity,” said Schlissel. “Given what we know today—what’s indisputable fact today about the impacts of burning fossil fuels—it is absolutely a crime against the future to be giving subsidies for enhanced oil recovery.”
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The day after the Guthrie County meeting, I ran into Kenkel again at an anti-pipeline rally in Fort Dodge, about 70 miles north. This gathering was put on by the Free Soil Foundation, a conservative anti-pipeline group dedicated to, per their website, “empowering land owners and citizens to stand against land grabs for private gain.” (“THIS IS THE GREEN NEW DEAL VERSUS THE FAMILY FARM,” the site proclaims.)
While emotions ran high in the room at Guthrie County, politics hadn’t entered the conversation. Former Iowa congressman Steve King, whose racist comments got him stripped from his House committee assignments before he lost his reelection bid in 2020, is a founder of the Free Soil Foundation. The tenor of the long meeting in Fort Dodge was undeniably much more aligned with his political perspective.
King, who offered copies of his new book for sale with all proceeds going towards the Foundation’s 501(c)3, drew connections between the now-defunct Navigator pipeline project, BlackRock, a Navigator backer, and the World Economic Forum. Iowa State Senator Sandy Salmon, who earlier this year introduced legislation that would restrict counties from banning gay conversion therapy, read aloud passages from Scripture that “support our private property rights.” A retired Navy nuclear weapons instructor and physics teacher gave a 45-minute presentation around the mechanics of the Satartia pipeline rupture, peppering his talk with comments about how carbon dioxide helps grow food and promoting a book from S. Fred Singer, a notorious climate denier. The John Birch Society, a 66-year-old right-wing group dedicated to ousting communism from America, whose ideas have made a resurgence in American politics over the past decade, was in the room filming. On my way back up to my hotel room, I picked up a flier laid out by organizers for an event advertised as a “Save our Children” conference, featuring a speaker who, according to the JBS website, offers talks on “LGTBQ propaganda” in public schools.
But there were some familiar threads. There were impassioned pleas from landowners, some of whom I spotted at the Guthrie County meeting the night before, who found themselves wrangling with a powerful company that wanted to use their land for an unfamiliar concept. There was an undercurrent of distrust of Summit as a corporation, and impassioned speeches against how the company had conducted itself —this time paired with King denouncing the Republican Party for pairing up with big business.
And there was a marked concern about the safety of the pipelines proposed to crisscross Iowa. It’s understandable why the Satartia event has raised such alarms. Eyewitness accounts from the accident sound like something out of a horror movie: residents collapsing suddenly in their homes, cars shutting off in the middle of the street. In May of this year, another leak near the small town of Sulphur, Louisiana released 107,000 gallons of the gas; residents were mostly told to shelter-in-place via social media, and the pipeline and pump station were unequipped with any sorts of alarms or public alert systems. (The owner of the pipeline, Denbury, was also the company responsible for the leak in Satartia. Denbury was purchased by ExxonMobil in 2023.)
The federal government, meanwhile, has not yet beefed up protections for these new pipelines. In February, four years after the Satartia accident, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), the federal agency tasked with regulating the nation’s networks of pipelines, submitted new safety regulations specifically for carbon dioxide pipelines to the White House for review. The final regulations have not yet been made public. A PHMSA spokesperson did not provide Drilled with any update on when the new rules would be released.
Raffensperger, the lawyer, points out that many of the safety standards PHMSA has put in place in the past have come directly from the industry it regulates. “The question is, will PHMSA come out with a strong enough rule?” she said. “They’re a captive agency in the sense that they incorporate by reference standards that the industry itself sets.”
Summit’s spokesperson pointed to the official PHMSA incident report on the Satartia rupture, which “identified several shortcomings specific” to Denbury, including a “failure to evaluate appropriate geohazards,” that helped cause the accident. “Since then, PHMSA has issued updated guidance, including a geohazard bulletin, to strengthen safety measures across the industry,” the spokesperson wrote. On its website, Summit maintains a lengthy section on safety measures, and the spokesperson states that the company is “committed to exceeding regulatory safety standards.”
“Contrary to some claims, no one was hospitalized, and no injuries were reported as a result of [the Satartia] incident,” the Summit spokesperson wrote to Drilled. It’s true that the official PHMSA report on the Satartia accident lists zero injuries and no hospitalizations. However, this is a function of PHMSA reporting standards at the time of the accident, which mandated only reporting injuries that required inpatient hospitalization—or overnight stays at a hospital. The 45 people taken to the hospital—a number reported by Denbury to PHMSA in the hours and days after the accident, and repeated multiple times throughout the official report by Mississippi’s state emergency management agency as well—therefore, do not “count” as injuries in the official incident report. (PHMSA has since updated its reporting form to gather information on injuries not requiring inpatient stays.)
HuffPost, which was the first outlet to report on the Satartia rupture a year and a half after it occurred, obtained 911 calls from the incident where a young woman with asthma can be heard gasping for air as her mother asks for an ambulance. The outlet talked to multiple residents who went to the hospital after collapsing and struggling to breathe—one man recalls passing out, then waking up in the hospital with an IV drip in his arm—and confirmed their treatment with the two regional hospitals who took in the victims.
There was also confusion from hospital staff about what, exactly, was happening to the victims, thanks in part to late communication from Denbury about the accident, Bill Caram, the executive director of the Pipeline Safety Trust, a watchdog organization, told Drilled.
“The hospital had no idea what they were dealing with, so they sent [victims] home—they didn’t know what to do with them. Those people were still sick the next day, so they went back to the hospital,” said Caram. “If the hospital knew what they were dealing with, I think it’s fair to say a lot of those people would have been treated with inpatient hospitalization.”
Both HuffPost and NPR, which followed up with Satartia residents more than three years after the leak, reported that several residents were experiencing long-term health effects. HuffPo examined the medical records of 78-year-old Marguerite Vinson, and found she had to seek oxygen treatments after the incident where she had previously had no breathing issues.
“I can’t think half-right! And I just wear out. Anything I try to do, it’s hard to do if it requires exertion,” Vinson told HuffPost.
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In July, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s team reached out to Kenkel, asking if he’d appear in a video the then-presidential nominee was making about the pipeline. The final product was shelved until October, when it was released to RFK Jr’s 4 million followers on X as a pro-Trump video. Peppered throughout it is language that toes extremely close to climate denial; RFK Jr’s voiceover, at one point, calls CO2 “a greenhouse gas often blamed for warming the planet.”
Reading the tea leaves on Summit’s future in Washington is as elusive an exercise as predicting anything in a Trump era. While Trump campaigned on rolling back the Inflation Reduction Act, which Project 2025 takes direct aim at, carbon capture credits, thanks to their favorability with the oil lobby, could stay safe. South Dakota’s Sen. John Thune, the new Senate majority leader, is seen as a valuable ally for the biofuels industry, as is Burgum. RFK Jr. is now Trump’s pick to head the Department of Health and Human Services. Meanwhile, Vivek Ramaswamy, another former Republican nominee, campaigned visibly in Iowa at the tail end of his candidacy against the pipeline, even joining a protest in Des Moines in early January. Trump has said he would appoint Ramaswamy, along with Elon Musk, to chair a special task force meant to significantly cut back on government spending. Ramaswamy did not answer questions from Drilled about whether or not his task force would focus on anything to do with the pipeline or carbon capture credits.
As the country speeds up the renewable energy transition, there’s been a troubling rise in local opposition stymying solar, wind, and other renewable energy projects that could help break our addiction to fossil fuels. From some climate spaces, there’s been a corresponding rise in focus on this opposition as the product of fossil fuel money—astroturfing false concerns in favor of blocking climate progress.
There is undoubtedly climate denier money at play in many of these battles: moneyed interests working for polluters have managed to amplify misinformation around offshore wind projects, while journalists have also uncovered specific instances of fossil fuels paying for messaging campaigns against renewable energy.
But painting all opposition to any climate solution as bought and paid for by fossil fuels misses the nuances of situations like Summit: how industrial climate solutions with their roots in making profits for polluters can sow doubt among the people whose buy-in is needed—especially when it involves untested and unregulated technologies. It misses how the politics of climate action are getting stirred up from their stasis over the past decade, and are getting murkier as so-called climate solutions begin to present financial opportunities for big businesses. And it misses how oil companies and other polluters need the public to buy into the idea of addressing climate now that they are profiting by painting themselves as part of the solution, pushing for technologies that will help them continue to maintain the status quo for decades to come.
The impact from organizing around Summit will undoubtedly spread beyond Iowa. Kenkel said he’s heard from counties around the country who are fearful of a pipeline crossing through their backyard and who have reached out to him for advice. A primer Kenkel wrote on how counties can oppose CO2 pipelines for the John Birch Society is available for purchase on the organization’s website in flyer format, to be distributed at chapter meetings around the country. As for his fifth-generation farm, Kenkel said he wants to pass it on to his grandchildren.
“I want them to know that I tried to protect them as much as I could forever,” he said.
Image: Ames, Iowa; Tony Webster from Portland, Oregon, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
