Clay Masters reports out of Iowa for NPR on the role of carbon pipelines in combatting climate change. Here's an excerpt:
Iowa is the country's top corn producer and almost 60% of that grain goes to produce ethanol, according to the Iowa Corn Growers Association. Archer-Daniel-Midlands (ADM), Summit Carbon Solutions and Navigator CO2 Ventures want to capture the carbon these plants emit into the air while making that fuel and then pipe it to be stored deep underground.
Chad Hart is an agricultural economist at Iowa State University and says the carbon would go deep underground in North Dakota or southern Illinois.
"Where there are deep mines that have open voids that can be filled with carbon dioxide as a way to reduce the amount of carbon being released into the atmosphere and sequester more of it underground," Hart says.
Hart says as American ethanol consumption levels off the industry wants to develop a carbon market especially with federal incentives to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
"COVID was a big shock to the system, not only for the ethanol industry, but the liquid fuel markets as a whole," Hart says, so the ethanol industry is "looking for what are these co-product opportunities that possibly create more stability in the financial return to an ethanol plant."
Emma Schmit chairs the local Democratic Party in Calhoun County and she's working to drum up opposition to the pipelines in her reliably Republican rural part of northwest Iowa. She's an organizer with the environmental advocacy organization Food and Water Watch and says landowners rights are what's uniting rural residents.
"Everybody across the political spectrum believes in the fact that a private corporation shouldn't be able to take your property for their own benefit without giving anything back," Schmit says.
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