by Dan Burns

Mar 19, 2025, 11:30 AM

Summit pauses its carbon capture application in South Dakota

A recent development:

Summit Carbon Solutions has temporarily suspended its application for permits related to a carbon capture pipeline project in South Dakota, following the recent signing of a law that bans the use of eminent domain for CO2 pipelines within the state…

As a result of this new law, Summit argues that the inability to carry out the necessary surveys has disrupted its original timeline, making the deadlines set by the PUC unfeasible.
(Carbon Herald)

So they say they need more time. Is that all that’s really going on? Since the Trump administration’s position is that human-caused climate change is all a Big Lie, why fund this, even though Big Oil supports it as a potential means to help them go on doing what they do?

There is this, from November:

Enter Trump. During his first term, the Republican’s EPA gave two states the lead role vetting CO2 storage wells within their borders (a feat only one additional state has managed under Biden), helping accelerate permitting and construction.

What’s more, Trump’s new pick to lead the EPA, former Republican Representative Lee Zeldin of New York, has been vocal in his support for carbon capture.
(EnergyNow)

But it’s hardly a given that what Trump and his cronies say, and what they end up doing, will turn out to be at all consistent.

A couple more things:

– This is from a long, detailed, and conclusive look at the failure of a big CCS (carbon capture and storage) project in Australia. A Chevron project, no less.

Gorgon’s failures are hyperlocal in many ways. Each problem that has been faced on the site is so specific to its location that it is unlikely to repeat itself elsewhere and there is very little that can be learned from this project to apply to the next attempt. But this is itself a generalisable lesson. Carbon capture and storage will always face these hyperlocal problems. This is especially so in an era when operators aren’t required to meet their commitments.

Alongside the fact that many carbon capture projects are simply narrative devices — with just enough work put in to make it look like there may not need to be a future beyond coal, oil and gas — these issues are why projects consistently fail and why the cost of CCS is not meaningfully decreasing over time.
(Medium)

And:

A Stanford study, published on February 9th, compared two extremes — one where 149 countries switch to powering their heat and electricity entirely with renewable energy (wind, solar, geothermal, and hydropower) by 2050 and another where the same countries maintain their current fossil fuel use but both add carbon capture equipment to industrial smokestacks and use direct air capture (DAC) to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. It found that when energy costs, health impacts, and emissions are taken into account, the overall cost of investing in carbon capture and removal is about 9-12 times higher than the cost of switching to 100% renewable energy.
(Environment America)

Comment from Mike: Trump has signed an executive order to activate a 1950 law to rush production of valuable minerals.

This will very likely help the mining companies in their bid to start digging around the BWCA.