After months of landowners fighting lawmakers, Summit Carbon Solutions will start providing their list of landowners that have not yet agreed to their pipeline proposal. This list of landowners is a list of properties that Summit Solutions may need to use eminent domain to force their use of the land.

Justin Kirchoff, the President of Summit Ag Investments gave an update on their land acquisition quest in a Radio Iowa report.

We’ve got about 750 landowners that have decided to sign voluntary easements with us today, so that’s about 270 miles of pipeline easements.

And those 750 landowners represent just around 40 percent of the land needed in Iowa says an article in the Des Moines Register.

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The submission process to the Iowa Utilities Board will take around a month to complete. Kirchoff says they will continue to sign voluntary easements to minimize the need to use eminent domain.

A lot of people have their worries about the carbon pipeline. In a recent letter to the Iowa Utilities Board, a group of academics, farmland owners, and environmental advocates laid out four science-based arguments on why they object to proposed pipeline projects. Their arguments include effects on crop yields, CO2 emissions, and ethanol milage.

Kirchoff adds that people also have “scar tissue” from the Dakota Access which cuts diagonally through Iowa shipping crude oil from North Dakota to Illinois.

 First and foremost, over 60% of this pipe is going to be eight inches or smaller and you compare that with Dakota Access, which is 30 inches. Just the whole process of installation is going to be a lot less invasive.

The Summit Pipeline will cut through five states. In those five states, they have gotten voluntary easements from one-third of landowners. In Iowa, the pipeline would reach a dozen ethanol plants.

We’re getting closer to fall here. Every other row of corn that’s harvested is going to wind up going to an ethanol plant. We think it's an incredibly important market and if we want to be competitive long-term we think that it certainly makes sense that we implement projects like this that make ethanol plants in the near term more profitable and in the long term more competitive in various markets.

There have been several county boards who have urged state officials to reject any eminent domain requests that are connected to any pipeline- not just Summit.

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