The prospects for Summit Carbon Solutions’ long-planned carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) project dimmed this week when a North Dakota judge revoked Summit’s permit to permanently sequester carbon dioxide (CO2) in underground storage.
The CO2 storage site was permitted by the North Dakota Industrial Commission (NDIC) under state law that allows the commission to “amalgamate” underground pore space, but South Central Judicial District Judge Jackson Lofgren found that the law allows “for the taking of the landowners’ pore space without just compensation being paid prior to the taking,” putting the law in violation of the state constitution. It is the second North Dakota district court to find the law unconstitutional.
Summit’s project, dubbed Midwest Carbon Express, would capture CO2 from dozens of ethanol plants (orange dots in map below) and other industrial sources in Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota. The CO2 would be aggregated and transported by pipeline to North Dakota, where it would be permanently sequestered in deep geologic formations. Summit’s project and similar efforts have all been beset to some degree by a combination of costs, demand uncertainty, complexity, permitting, infrastructure and local opposition (see We’ve Only Just Begun).
