S15, Ep2 | The Ethanol Kingpin of Iowa

Amy: [00:00:00] Cast your minds back to the fall of 2011. If you were on a college campus anywhere in the country, you were probably hearing something like this.

Occupy Wall Street archival: Shut down Wall Street. Shut down Wall Street. We will not go quietly. We will be marching. To

One Police Plaza. To One Police Plaza. We march at 5:30. We march at 5:30. We march at 5:30. We want to see everyone there. We want to see everyone there.

Amy: Occupy Wall Street protests weren't just happening on Wall Street or in New York. They exploded everywhere. People were taking to the streets to protest economic inequality. At Iowa State University, student protesters began to focus on one particular example of corporate greed by one of the university's board [00:01:00] members.

Angie Carter: Bruce Rastetter is not a stranger in Iowa. That's a name that people who are involved in ag and foos- food systems are very familiar with already, and we were quite concerned about the involvement of our institution in what seemed like a very colonial agricultural development project, um, and immediately started asking some questions.

Amy: This is Angie Carter. She was a student organizer with Occupy at Iowa State University at the time, where Bruce Rastetter was on the Board of Regents. The Oakland Institute, a nonprofit policy think tank, had just released a report about how Rastetter had roped Iowa State into a land deal in Tanzania.

He'd initially pitched it as a sustainable development project. Two companies related to Bruce's Summit Agricultural Group partnered with Iowa State [00:02:00] University and wanted to buy some land in Tanzania and use it to help bring modern agricultural practices to the country. They would grow corn and soybeans there, and also teach the locals how to produce added-value products.

Sound familiar?

Kory Melby: Cycle one is deforestation and cattle. Cycle two is soy. Cycle 2.5 is soy and corn, basically, you know, the, the combination. Cycle three now gets to be, um, what we would say industrial or added value. No different than Iowa.

Amy: That's Kory Melby, the agricultural consultant we heard from in Brazil last time.

Anyhow, Bruce and his partners were hoping Oakland Institute would sign on and lend their stamp of approval to the project. Instead, the nonprofit brought global attention to the fact that one guy sat at the center of all of it, and seemed to be the [00:03:00] only one who would actually benefit, Bruce Rastetter.

Iowa State University's involvement had also been brokered by Bruce. He insisted that while he wanted the project to be financially successful, he saw it as largely a philanthropic one

Angie Carter: And they sent some initial researchers from Iowa State over, you know, to do soil sampling and things, and he was proposing that there would be opportunities to do development projects.

And it just seemed to us that this was all in his interest, right, that he was using the public university to further his private interests. The Oakland Institute was also asking, you know, "If this is a true development project, you know, like where, where's the input of the folks on the ground? What do they know about this?

When did they know about this? How have they been involved?"

Amy: That was an important question because Bruce's company and the Tanzanian government had been describing this land as empty and uninhabited. But there were [00:04:00] 160,000 Burundi refugees living and farming on it. They'd been there for 40 years. Many members of the community had been born there.

They'd been born in Tanzania, but only the year prior in 2010 had been afforded citizenship rights, sort of. Now the deal was agree to be evicted and we'll give you the final papers.

Angie Carter: We were in the sustainable agriculture program, and I think just the social justice implications, both on the Iowa side of abusing this public resource and, of course, on the Tanzanian side, thinking about the human rights of the Burundi refugees who were to be displaced.

We were really concerned.

Amy: The Tanzanian government's plan was to scatter these people throughout the country, giving them no choice about where they relocated, and only $200 to start over. Rastetter and other executives involved with the project said the refugees weren't their responsibility [00:05:00] and they couldn't do anything about the government's plan.

But the students, local organizers, and the Oakland Institute thought that answer wasn't good enough. They campaigned against the project and went to the media. They even got Dan Rather to cover it.

Dan Rather archival: When we spoke to Agrisol's business partners in Tanzania, they said what happens to the refugees should not be their concern.

What's your response to that? You know, they cannot get away. In fact, that's actually one of the things I was also told by Mr. Rastetter as well as by university. Now, you're hoping to make a lot of money by moving into an area where somebody already lives. To put on the entire responsibility and the blame onto the government is extremely irresponsible, especially when the people who are involved in it talk about it being a socially responsible investment.

Amy: That was Arundhata Mittal, executive director of the Oakland Institute, talking to Rather [00:06:00] in 2011. Had the Tanzania deal been the only bad press Bruce Rastetter ever got in his home state, it might have just blown over, but Iowans were understanding it through the lens of past stories. Here's former Iowa State student, Angie Carter, again.

Angie Carter: A lot of farmers dislike him because he's described as the person who consolidated the pork industry and then sold all that to consolidate the ethanol industry, and has just been really fueling the agricultural consolidation at the state level, which has put a lot of farmers out of business.

Amy: By roping the state's public university into his business, Bruce had really become a villain for some Iowans.

I'm Amy Westervelt, and this is Carbon Cowboys, the story of how the ethanol kingpin of Iowa became the king of corn in Brazil, and what it tells us about the limits of technology and markets to [00:07:00] solve the climate crisis. This season is a collaboration between Drilled and The Intercept Brazil. You can get the Portuguese version, hosted by Felipe Sabrina, over on The Intercept Brazil's feed.

Bruce Rastetter and his companies and their various PR people have declined our various interview requests, though they did get on a background call to check some facts. So we had to talk to other Iowans. After the break, a visit with Bruce's neighbors.

Intro music

When most people think of Iowa, they think of people like Kathy Carter.

Kathy Carter: Oh, excuse me, I just had to swallow some pop here.

Amy: And for a long time, Kathy felt like she was living the essential Iowa country life.

Kathy Carter: I'm a farmer's daughter and a farm girl. My husband's ideal situation is to be at the end of a very [00:08:00] long lane surrounded by a bunch of trees with a hungry bear tied at the end of the driveway, is what he says.

That's how isolated he wants to be. So this acreage, he planted a bunch of trees around it and, you know, windbreak and other trees, and this was his little paradise.

Amy: But about 20 years ago, things started to change.

Kathy Carter: Well, my husband was on an acreage in Hamilton County, and Hamilton County borders Hardin County. Mm-hmm. Well, Hardin County is Bruce Rastetter's home territory. That's where he was born and raised and where he has his big estate and where he has his Summit Ag headquarters. And from our living room window, we could see the Summit Ag headquarters east of us, just a mile down the road.

Amy: Suddenly, there were factory farms in every direction around Kathy and her husband's home, with thousands of animals confined in small pens.

Kathy Carter: Once in a while, on a nice, [00:09:00] quiet evening, we could try and open a window and get a little fresh air. We'd be sitting there watching TV and my husband would sniff and he'd say- Um, you better go close the windows.

'Cause the wind had shifted one tiny little bit, and the odor came in. Mm-hmm. We didn't dare go to bed with the windows open, 'cause during the night, you know, we'd get the smell. Yes. And once it's in, it's really hard to get it out. It's just trapped. I, I, I love to hang laundry outside. Well, I'd go out, and I'd stick my wet finger in the wind, you know the old trick, see which w- way the wind's coming

Yeah, yeah. Well, I'd go out and check the wind, and I thought, "Oh, I can go hang out clothes today." And I'd get a load of laundry done, and I'd walk outside with my basket full of wet clothes, and the wind had shifted. We used to have a motorcycle, and it got to the point where every direction, no matter where we went, we had to drive down the road through a cloud of something.

And so we finally sold the motorcycle 'cause we just never used it. We never went anywhere with it anymore.

Amy: Eventually, [00:10:00] Kathy inherited a small plot of land about an hour north where she'd grown up.

Kathy Carter: Dad and Mom had sold off the crop ground, but retained what used to be cattle pasture, and there's a lot of woods at one end, and there's a creek running through it.

Amy: There was no house or any buildings at all on the property, but Kathy's husband, Lou, liked to drive up there and go deer hunting. And after a few years of driving back and forth, they found a house nearby and moved there permanently.

Kathy Carter: And in August of 2021, I got this letter from Summit Carbon Solutions saying that they were going to do this CO2 pipeline, and it was going to go across my property west of town, that old pasture area where Lou goes hunting, that ground.

It's not a big piece of ground, but it's my ground, and they're gonna put a CO2 line across it? What?

Amy: Kathy said she felt like she'd left one part of the state to escape Bruce's hog farms, only to have him try to take her land for his [00:11:00] carbon pipeline in another part of the state. For its part, Summit says its preference is to work out voluntary easements with landowners, but it's also trying to build over 1,000 miles of pipeline, and it argues that giving too much power to holdouts would make it impossible for any big infrastructure project to be built.

In July 2025, Summit Carbon Solutions brought in a new CEO, Joe Griffin. Griffin previously ran a natural gas company that was backed by one of Summit's primary investors, Harold Hamm. His first order of business was repairing the company's relationships with landowners, especially after both South Dakota and Iowa passed statewide bans on eminent domain.

South Dakota's ban was signed by the governor and is in place. Iowa's was ultimately vetoed by Governor Kim Reynolds. Pipeline opponents point to her long-standing relationship with [00:12:00] Rastetter, the top individual donor to her campaigns, as a driver of that veto. But Reynolds insisted that it was poorly written legislation that targeted just one type of project: carbon capture pipelines.

Opponents of Summit's Midwest Carbon Express proposed two other versions of the bill in 2026. Summit Carbon Solutions points to various reasons that they got off on the wrong foot with community members, from the fact that they had to submit a proposed route as part of the permitting process before they were even allowed to reach out to landowners, to the fact that they were a new company just getting their feet under them.

Under Griffin's leadership, they've had at least a dozen public meetings to try to repair relationships, and even drafted a community and land ownership partnership program and a series of commitments. They might have had an easier time had they not been named Summit and had Rastetter not been doing business a particular way [00:13:00] in Iowa for decades.

Thanks to his early involvement in confined hog farms and industrial-scale corn and ethanol, Rastetter is connected with the state's shift from family farming to industrial agriculture for a lot of Iowans. One neighbor of Bruce's who asked to remain anonymous and have his voice disguised for fear of retaliation described Bruce as more of a businessman than a farmer.

Neighbor: He has a hunting preserve behind his house. He'll put up a food plot and then go back and shoot his record deer. That's really not hunting, if you ask me. His fish feeder, you know, on his deck, well, you go fishing and pull out some really nice bass. Well, is it fishing if you feed them all the time? He has a horse stable, has these big, black, beautiful Percheron horses, and he has a semi, Summit Farms on it and a picture of a horse, and they go down the state fair.

Bruce don't know how to handle those horses. [00:14:00] He has an Amish guy do it.

Amy: Rastetter hosts legendary parties in the large barn on his property, often related to fundraising or campaigning for conservative politicians.

Jess Mazour: It's a big compound with a big party barn and a huge house.

Amy: That's Jess Mazour again, the Sierra Club organizer you heard from last episode.

Jess Mazour: He hosts an annual summer party, and this party is, like, a political party, and people like Chris Christie and Ted Cruz, you name it, like, all the political bigwigs from across the country come to his summer party, and that's where he wines and dines. And we've protested a few times at his summer parties.

But he's been named in the news here in Iowa as the Iowa political kingmaker. At our Iowa State Fair, one of the buildings is called Rastetter Hall

Amy: So Bruce was already disliked for his smelly hog farms and for being the sort of farmer whose jeans are just a little too clean, and then came the [00:15:00] bad press for the Tanzania land deal.

Jess Mazour: So since 2012, since that big land grab attempt in Africa, he has become a dirty word in, in Iowa. I think anyone who remotely follows politics or agriculture, you say Rastetter, you're gonna get a response.

Amy: After the Tanzania story made global headlines, Bruce laid low for a bit.

But while the Tanzania project had imploded, Bruce's interest in expanding his ag business beyond the US had been piqued. He wasn't gonna just let it go so easily. Plus, he had to have learned a few key lessons. Make sure you get in business with people who know the local land setup. Get to know the people and the place a bit before you commit.

And find local ag partners and managers, not just local spokespeople. Maybe don't be a pioneer. Go where others have gone before.[00:16:00]

Land Ledger archival: You know, ADM, Cargill, Bunge, all the US companies have done business, as you know, in Brazil for a long time.

Amy: But the idea of going into a foreign market and modernizing it, that was still very much part of Bruce's game plan for Brazil. This is Bruce on The Land Ledger podcast in 2024.

Land Ledger archival: We believe Brazil was gonna raise a significant amount of second crop corn.

At the time, it was smaller corn crop in 2011, and second crop hadn't caught on. It was sunflowers and cotton.

Amy: This term he uses, second crop corn, it's how people in the corn ethanol business talk about sustainability in Brazil. If you plant corn as the second crop after soybeans, for example, then on paper at least, it's responsible for fewer environmental impacts.

It's something corn ethanol guys need to do to qualify for the lucrative sustainable aviation fuel market.

Land Ledger archival: But it was clear to [00:17:00] me that Mato Grosso would outpace the US in not only soybean production like they have. They will produce more second crop corn in the future than Minnesota and, and soon to be than Iowa.

So we believed it was a good spot to build a corn ethanol plant, so we built Brazil's first modern corn ethanol plant.

Amy: This time, there were no student protests or bad press to stop them. Meanwhile, back in Iowa, with a steady supply of cheap Brazilian corn and ethanol, Rastetter set about expanding his business once again into a new added-value product, carbon.

Kory Melby: You could almost say carbon sequestration would be cycle four now.

Amy: Kory was cutting out there a little bit, but he said, "You could almost say carbon sequestration would be cycle four now."

Carbon sequestration is checking a lot of boxes for corn ethanol guys. Corn ethanol has too high a carbon footprint to [00:18:00] qualify as sustainable aviation fuel, but if you attach a carbon capture and storage project to an ethanol refinery, you can remove that problem and create not just sustainable jet fuel, but also a whole new revenue stream.

That captured carbon can be sold either as a carbon credit to a company looking to offset its emissions, or to an oil company looking to inject it underground to help extract more oil. It's a process called enhanced oil recovery. That's even before you cash in on the tax breaks for both carbon capture and sustainable aviation fuel.

Iowa's main competitor for that market is Brazil, but now Summit could play both sides, cutting its costs for ethanol by producing more of it in Brazil, refining it into sustainable aviation fuel in the US, and capturing and selling carbon in both countries. It was a win-win, and how could anyone argue against all that green entrepreneurship?[00:19:00]

Kory Melby: You know, gotta give Bruce and the guys credit. They're just, they're Republicans. They don't give a shit about any of this stuff. But, you know, again, I'm, I'm being probably condescending here. The tree huggers and the liberals created this shit.

Amy: Then Bruce's carbon dreams began to turn into a nightmare back home in Iowa.

In 2021, 10 years after he made front-page news for a suspicious, supposedly sustainable development in Tanzania, maybe Rastetter thought organizers had forgotten about him in Iowa. Or maybe he thought environmentalists would be thrilled about a big carbon capture project and no one else would fight him on it.

Whatever the case, Rastetter's company seemed wholly unprepared for the backlash against their carbon pipeline project. In the past few years, even Rastetter's conservative political [00:20:00] allies have been turning on him over it.

Guthrie County meeting: Hi, everybody. Welcome. Welcome. So I'd like to welcome you. We're gonna just get started real quick with our, with our prayer.

Our Father in Heaven-

Amy: In the summer of 2024, our reporter, Molly Taft, took a field trip to Iowa. She went there to cover what was happening with the Summit Pipeline. She'd head to public meetings, often held at the county fairgrounds down at the end of a country road between a couple of corn fields.

Molly Taft: Um, so yeah, it is packed at the Guthrie County Fairground Event Center.

Amy: Those meetings often started with prayers like this one. Our hearts are heavy with a burden, namely the threat against our rights to the property we own. She found a broad spectrum of people at these meetings who really hated the idea of this pipeline. [00:21:00] Dodging cows down country roads, Molly would head to the meeting location expecting to find a small community center and a handful of people, only to arrive and discover that it was packed.

One was even led by ultra-conservative former Iowa congressman, Steve King.

Steve King: Thanks, Barb. Um, thanks all of you for being here. A lot of you are here because you're the target of Summit, and it was the target of Larry Fink and Navigators and Bruce Rastetter and Summit.

Amy: Jess Mazour, the Sierra Club organizer, gave presentations at a lot of them, too.

Jess Mazour: Well, Summit Carbon Solutions and the other carbon pipeline companies in the country are telling us that this is how we're going to solve climate change. And whether you believe in climate change or not, that is what Summit's claiming.

Amy: Summit has leaned into the idea of the pipeline as a lifeline to the ethanol industry, and Molly talked to some ethanol folks who agreed.

Kelly: This opportunity of sustainable aviation fuel is Mind-boggling Kelly [00:22:00] Nieuwenhuis is a farmer in Northwest Iowa and a 20-year veteran of the ethanol industry. It's a huge opportunity, but we won't qualify unless we lower our carbon intensity scores.

Amy: The sustainable aviation fuel market is expected to grow from under $3 billion in 2025 to more than 350 billion by 2035, and all corn ethanol companies need to do to be part of that is install carbon capture on their facilities.

Kelly said despite all those packed public meetings and people opposing the pipeline, where he's based, just as many or more have quietly sold their land to Summit for it.

Kelly: In, in our area, roughly 80% of landowners have signed easements. And the de- the situation is we have the loud minority and, and the silent majority, because people that are supportive of it from the most part don't wanna be heckled or, you know, [00:23:00] don't have to wanna deal with the negative people.

Amy: Kelly was opposed, though, to the idea of imported Brazilian ethanol being turned into sustainable aviation fuel in the US. He views it as a threat to American producers like him.

Kelly: The sustainable aviation fuel plant that's in Georgia right now is producing sustainable aviation fuel with Brazilian ethanol.

They're importing it, and that shouldn't be happening.

Amy: In addition to Brazilian ethanol being cheaper, Summit has been working to make it lower carbon. Iowa producers can't compete with that. Kory Milby talked to me about this, too.

Kory Melby: It's all the same shit. Right. But because of carbon, the Brazilians can get a, a premium price to ship, you know, ethanol to the United States.

Amy: Meanwhile, some Iowans aren't worried about the long-term environmental impact of the pipeline [00:24:00] or how it would affect the ethanol industry. They're worried about its immediate health impacts.

If these pipelines and storage facilities are gonna be built around their homes, what if there's a leak? The example everyone always points to on this is the town of Satartia, Mississippi, where a small leak caused what sounded like a zombie apocalypse.

Public meeting: The town of Satartia was gassed. Over 40 people went to the hospital. People were passing out, going unconscious, foaming at the mouth, and to this day, they still have major health impacts, memory loss, breathing issues, and other neurological problems.

Amy: But the biggest concern for folks in Iowa, the one we heard about over and over again, it was land.

Comments on land: Summit Ag is still in, like, the top 10 landowners of, um, in Iowa.

He's trying to put this carbon pipeline through the state, taking other people's land by force.

So basically, they [00:25:00] own your land. They can do whatever they want with it

Amy: Summit needs a certain amount of land to build the pipeline along its preferred route, and if it can't buy that land, it will resort to taking it with eminent domain.

Back at the public meeting in Iowa, our reporter, Molly, caught up with Steve Kenkel, a former county supervisor who unexpectedly found himself in the middle of this controversy.

Steve Kenkel: And I actually brought it up to one of the Iowa Utility Board members who was moderating the meeting for Summit. And I asked him, I said, "So, does the county have any say in this?

When are you gonna sit down and talk to us? Do we have a say where it might go or whatever?" And all I got was a shrug of the shoulder.

Molly Taft: Literally?

Steve Kenkel: Literally.

Molly Taft: In the meeting?

Steve Kenkel: At the meeting.

Amy: When Steve Kenkel and his fellow supervisors passed an ordinance requiring that the pipeline be set back from homes and schools in the county, Summit sued them personally in their roles as supervisors, along with [00:26:00] the county.

Steve Kenkel: We revised our existing ordinance, you know, to put in the other setbacks I talked about. We had three public hearings. We could have waived two, but we made sure we had three. Summit was at the meetings.

Amy: The ordinance restricted where carbon pipelines could be sited in the county. But according to Kenkel, Summit didn't file any official comments about it, either in writing or at public meetings held before it passed.

Steve Kenkel: We had 100 and some people either spoke for the ordinance or had written comments in favor of the ordinance. We had zero people submit anything against the ordinance, including Summit, and they were there, and I felt good after we passed it, 'cause they had no questions, no comments, nothing about the ordinance.

And four days later, they sue us, and sue us personally too.

Molly Taft: You're sued personally? They are naming you-

Steve Kenkel: Besides the county, yep.

Molly Taft: What-

Steve Kenkel: Us three supervisors.

Molly Taft: So this is actually another one of my questions. What, what on earth are they [00:27:00] possibly suing you for?

Steve Kenkel: For... suing us to stop us from enforcing the ordinance.

Molly Taft: You personally?

Steve Kenkel: Yep. That's- They're not suing us for damages. They didn't, yet anyway.

Amy: At the same time Bruce and his partners' carbon pipeline was falling farther and farther behind schedule in Iowa, they were selling the Brazilian government and local officials in Mato Grosso on the many benefits of carbon capture, and it worked.

COP 30 CCS Panel: And with great pleasure, Daniel Lopez from FS will talk to us about his project he's developing here.

Amy: In November 2025, I was at the annual UN Climate Summit, the COP, in Brazil, an event that was positively overflowing with booths and talks and events about the marvels of carbon capture At one of them, Daniel Lopez, Executive Vice President of Sustainability and New Business for Summit's Brazilian company, FS Fueling Sustainability, presented a plan that sounded a whole lot [00:28:00] like Summit's Iowa carbon capture plans, but this time in Brazil.

In fact, Lopez even called Mato Grosso, where the project is being built-

Daniel Lopes: In, uh, Brazilian Midwest

Amy: That's right, the Brazilian Midwest. And this time they'd learned their lesson. FS Fueling Sustainability would avoid having to take farmers' land for their carbon capture project.

Daniel Lopes: This is a project that, uh, will be injecting carbon, 120,000 tons per year, and it's located inside of our, uh, corn ethanol facilities, so no need for, for pipelines, no, uh, impact on, on farmers nearby and everything else.

Amy: According to Lopes, it wouldn't just create revenue for corn ethanol producers, it would change the world.

Daniel Lopes: We're generating the first, uh, carbon negative ethanol in the world, which I think is, uh, is gonna be a, a, a protagonist on energy transition.

Amy: It helps that the FS carbon capture effort is funded by the Brazilian government.

Daniel Lopes: Which means we can move [00:29:00] ahead and help with the regulation with the, with the Brazilian government.

Amy: It's a little hard to hear him there, but he says, "We can move ahead and help with the regulation with the Brazilian government." Companies helping with regulation has not historically resulted in great climate solutions.

Next time, how Bruce and the guys managed to take over the Brazilian Midwest in just a decade.

We reached out to Bruce Rastetter, Harold Hamm, the Franz brothers, Miguel Vaz Ribeiro, and all Summit companies and Brazilian government agencies mentioned in this season for comment, and have incorporated any responses we received throughout the season.

Credits: Carbon Cowboys: Cowboys of the Cerrado is a collaboration between Drilled and The Intercept Brazil. The show was reported and written by Felipe Sabrina and me, Amy [00:30:00] Westervelt. Our editors are Aldri Queen in the US and Alicia de Souza in Brazil. Our senior producer and sound designer is Martin Zaltz Austwick.

Audio production and sound design in Brazil by Marcia Geberdosa and Felipe Muks. Additional reporting by Molly Taft. Theme song and original music by Eric Derena. Additional music by Martin Zaltz Austwick. Our engineer is Peter Duff. Artwork for Drilled is by Matt Fleming. US fact-checking from Naomi Barr.

Brazil fact-checking by Estudio Frontera. Our First Amendment attorney is James Wheaton with the First Amendment Project. We are also proud members of Reporters Shield. Big thanks also to Andrew Fishman, president of The Intercept Brazil. Drilled is distributed by Pushkin Industries. Huge thanks to the team there, including Greta Cohen, Eric Sandler, Grace Ross, Morgan Ratner, Owen Miller, Kira [00:31:00] Posey, Jordan McMillan, Brian Scheberneck, and Jake Flanagan.

To hear the Portuguese version of this series, head over to The Intercept Brazil's site or search for The Intercept Brazil's podcast feed wherever you listen to podcasts.