RFS Archives

July 16, 2024

A battle in rural Midwest as farmers fight carbon capture pipeline

By Nina Elkadi

Kathy Stockdale and her husband have spent almost 50 years working the land in central Iowa. As a family farmer raising corn and soybeans, Stockdale knows how to deal with harsh weather, poor crop prices, and an array of other challenges that come with a making a living in agriculture.

But the operation she has spent a lifetime cultivating now faces a threat unlike any Stockdale has previously faced: Developers are planning to carve through her property with a pipeline carrying hazardous CO2 gas from ethanol plants, and there is little she can do to stop them.

The pipeline would run a mere 700 feet from Stockdale’s front doorstop and would create a barrier between the home she shares with her husband and the nearby home where her son lives. The farm’s soils and wetlands would be forever altered by the pipeline intrusion, and if the pipeline were to rupture, the damage could be catastrophic, Stockdale fears.

“It consumes your thoughts. You don’t sleep. You ask any of the landowners who have been fighting this, it’s been hard, it’s been stressful,” she said.

The Stockdales are among many farm families in Iowa and four other Midwestern states fighting to kill the pipeline, which was proposed three years ago by Summit Carbon Solutions (SCS) as the “world’s largest carbon capture and storage project.” SCS had initially planned to start operating the 2,500-mile pipeline network, dubbed the Midwest Carbon Express, this year. But opposition across the rural Midwest has delayed the project.

June 2, 2022

Warning of food and gas price hikes, critics fight EPA rule to boost biofuels

With the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) poised to finalize a rule setting annual biofuel production goals, industry players from jet fuel producers to pet food makers are warning the rule will hike already rising food and gas prices and exacerbate supply shortages.

The renewable fuel standard (RFS) rule, due to be finalized Friday under a deadline set in an April 22 consent decree, is seen by its supporters as a key step in lowering greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and fighting climate change. Biofuels proponents say there is sufficient feedstock – renewable material which can be used or converted to use as transportation fuel, such as corn – to satisfy ambitious RFS goals while also meeting needs for non-fuel uses like food.

But critics say anticipated RFS annual production target increases will have massive and widespread negative effects on everything from grocery store prices to fuel supplies.