Story County, Iowa’s efforts to regulate pipeline are challenged in court

by Clark Kauffman

Summit Carbon Options, which hopes to construct a pipeline to move carbon dioxide throughout Iowa, is suing Story County to dam efforts to control the pipeline’s development and placement.

Summit filed a lawsuit Monday in U.S. District Court docket for Southern District of Iowa in opposition to the Story County Board of Supervisors. The corporate is alleging the regionally elected county supervisors are trying to impose on the challenge “public security” necessities which might be the unique province of federal regulators.

Summit is creating an interstate pipeline that, if accomplished, will transport carbon dioxide captured from greater than 30 amenities — primarily ethanol crops but additionally fertilizer crops — throughout South Dakota, North Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota, and Iowa by way of a community of 1,900 miles of underground pipes.

In Iowa, the challenge would seemingly contain 680 miles of pipeline by way of 30 counties.

Summit is now within the strategy of surveying routes for the challenge and securing the required permits whereas negotiating with landowners for entry to their property.

Summit has been working with the Iowa Utilities Board for greater than a 12 months as a part of the planning and allowing course of. The corporate says it has already obtained voluntary easements for almost 60% of the proposed route in Iowa, and has paid out hundreds of thousands of {dollars} to Iowa landowners.

The lawsuit alleges that some Iowa counties, together with Story County, have taken steps on their very own to control pipelines. That’s improper, the lawsuit asserts, as a result of the federal authorities regulates the security of pipelines such because the one proposed by Summit, and the Iowa Utilities Board has the statutory authority to situation route permits.

On Oct. 25, the Story County Board of Supervisors handed an ordinance that establishes setback and different necessities for hazardous supplies pipelines within the county.

The lawsuit notes that at a board of supervisors assembly on Oct. 18, Amelia Schoeneman, Story County’s planning and improvement director, defined the aim of the ordinance was to control “hazardous supplies pipelines that pose … well being and security dangers” to the general public. The setbacks, she acknowledged in a memo to the board, have been “the minimal needed to guard public security.”

Summit argues the Story County ordinance prevents the corporate “from finishing — and even starting — the portion of the pipeline challenge in Story County.” The corporate says “federal legislation already completely regulates interstate pipeline security beneath the Pipeline Security Act,” which was enacted by Congress in 1994.

That federal legislation, Summit claims, expressly preempts any native authorities’s try and impose security rules on interstate pipeline initiatives.

Lawsuit might have an effect in different counties 

The lawsuit seeks a courtroom order declaring Story County’s ordinance to be preempted by the Pipeline Security Act and thus invalid and unenforceable, not less than because it pertains to Summit’s deliberate pipeline. Such an order would seemingly have an effect on different Iowa counties which have sought to control pipelines, in addition to different corporations which have competing pipeline initiatives.

A central factor of Summit’s lawsuit is the significance of ethanol manufacturing to Iowa’s financial system. The lawsuit notes that greater than half of all corn harvested in Iowa goes to ethanol manufacturing. The corn grown in Iowa is used to create 26% of all American ethanol, the corporate argues, and “corn’s worth in Iowa — and all through the nation — is inextricably tied to ethanol manufacturing.”

A co-plaintiff within the Summit case, who helps give the corporate standing to sue in federal courtroom, is William Couser, a Story County farmer who owns a 5,200-head feed lot alongside the Summit pipeline route.

The entire corn grown on the Couser farms, excluding a small quantity that’s fed to his cattle, is offered to Lincolnway Power for ethanol manufacturing, in accordance with the lawsuit.

Couser is without doubt one of the founders of Lincolnway Power, which operates its ethanol manufacturing facility in Story County. With the pipeline, Lincolnway Power would have a so-called “carbon depth rating” that may allow it to ship ethanol to California and Pacific Northwest markets presently which might be presently closed to the corporate.

Story County has but to file a response to the lawsuit.

Two weeks in the past, the Shelby County Board of Supervisors gave unanimous approval to an ordinance that may drive Summit and different pipeline corporations to acquire county permits for development and impose restrictions on any pipeline’s proximity to houses, faculties, and farms. At this level, Shelby County just isn’t named as a defendant in Summit’s lawsuit.

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