Informational meeting with emergency personnel to be conducted

**Riley Gibson, representing Summit Carbon Solutions, gave the Crawford County Board of Supervisors an update on the project on Tuesday morning.** Photo by Dan Mundt

Riley Gibson, representing Summit Carbon Solutions, visited the Crawford County Board of Supervisors meeting on Tuesday to give an update on the status of the project.

The following is a condensed account of the discussion.

Summit is planning to build a pipeline to carry carbon dioxide (CO2) from Midwestern ethanol plants to North Dakota, where it will be permanently buried underground.

Gibson said he has not had much to update recently about the project because company resources have been dedicated to South Dakota and North Dakota, where permits were denied to the company last fall.

The issues in the Dakotas could push out by a year, to 2025, the start of Summit’s construction schedule, Gibson said.

He said a lot of bridges would have to be crossed before construction could start.

Supervisor Craig Dozark asked if the company would have to get approval from North Dakota, South Dakota and Iowa before the project would proceed.

“I believe so,” Gibson said.

He said it wouldn’t make much sense to put resources into construction before knowing if it can go into North Dakota and South Dakota.

Summit’s goal is to be operational by 2026, Gibson said, but noted that thousands of permits for state and local road crossings still have to be taken care of.

He said Summit has spent something like $350 million on easements for the project, with north of $158 million spent on easements in Iowa.

Gibson said about $4.5 billion would be needed to get the project operational.

Board of Supervisors Chairperson Jean Heiden asked if the project could get too expensive.

The Navigator project may have come up against becoming more expensive than anticipated, he said.

Last October, Navigator CO2 Ventures canceled a similar pipeline, citing unpredictable state regulatory processes.

Gibson said Summit’s current push in Iowa is to set meetings with county emergency officials to discuss “dispersion models” that show how the CO2 in the pipeline would disperse if the pipeline were ruptured at different points along the route.

He said the meetings would be an open forum for emergency personnel to go over county-specific maps and ask questions.

Gibson said the information would be provided to emergency personnel in a continuing conversation before the pipeline would go into operation.

He said the presentation offers a lot of good information about dispersion modeling that he found to be very useful.

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Cindy Kruthoff, who owns land in the path of the pipeline and joined the meeting via Zoom, asked if landowners would be invited to the dispersion modeling meetings.

“At this time, no,” Gibson said.

He said there was a security aspect to not inviting everyone to the meetings, but said the company definitely wants to get the information into the hands of county representatives.

“Maybe sometime down the road we’ll be able to (share with landowners),” he said.

“… with all the information that leads up to how we got our dispersion modeling, I think it would be a little bit irresponsible just to throw a bunch of maps out into the public without very extensive, front-end ‘this is how we got our information,’” Gibson said.

Kruthoff asked if emergency management personnel would be sworn to secrecy or asked to sign nondisclosure agreements (NDAs).

Gibson said emergency personnel would not be required to sign NDAs and that he thought they could do with the information as they please.

“I would hope just our supervisors would see the unethical method that would be not to include the people who are most at risk - the landowners,” Kruthoff said.

“The supervisors are more than welcome to be a part of it, as well,” Gibson said. “That will be information that at the end of the day if the supervisors want to discuss it at a meeting, that will be the county’s prerogative.”

Gibson said the company would go over all the information again when the route is permitted and the project is moving into construction.

Kruthoff said she wanted to compare Summit’s information about the “danger zone” with the information Navigator had provided to see if Summit’s analysis is the same.

Heiden asked if Kruthoff could attend the meeting.

Gibson said it might be possible in the future but not now.

Crawford County Emergency Management Coordinator Greg Miller said the point of the dispersion modeling meeting would be for emergency responders to learn about how to respond to an incident; he said it would be easier to do the meeting with just emergency personnel, and the company could have a separate meeting with landowners, which he said would be important.

Kruthoff said she would not be satisfied with that arrangement.

“It’s a closed meeting - that just means it’s secretive …” she said.

Someone should represent the landowners at the meeting, Kruthoff said.

Miller said he would accept one landowner representative, but “I just don’t want this to turn into a political nightmare.”

Gibson said he would have to clear it through Summit and said their stance from the beginning has been to give information on a “need to know basis first.”

He said the presentations are about emergency personnel in a “worst case scenario” responding to a breach of the pipeline.

Miller or someone else at the meeting could sit down with the supervisors at a board meeting and share their takeaway about the information, Gibson said.

He said at this point the information can’t be shared with the public.

Read more in next week’s Denison Free Press.

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