Dec. 12, 2024 5:22 pm, Updated: Dec. 13, 2024 7:38 amSummit Carbon Solutions has demanded that opponents of its carbon dioxide pipeline project retract certain “false and defamatory” statements and cease further similar comments about the company.Those statements “have now exposed you to significant legal liability,” according to a letter the company’s attorneys sent to Jess Mazour, of the Sierra Club of Iowa, in November. “Summit Carbon Solutions and its investors have invested over $1 billion in this project to date.”
The Sierra Club said Thursday that Summit has sent at least six of the letters, but it declined to reveal the other recipients.
“This isn’t going to stop us from doing what we’ve been doing for the last three years because we haven’t been doing anything illegal,” Mazour told The Gazette. “We’ve been working with impacted Iowans to protect our state from hazardous carbon pipelines, and we have every right to do that.”
Summit wants to build a sprawling pipeline system in five states that would transport captured carbon dioxide from more than 50 ethanol plants to North Dakota for underground sequestration.
It has gained route permits in three of them — including in Iowa — but not in South Dakota, where voters recently squashed new legislation that would have made it easier for Summit to gain a permit in that state. The company reapplied for a South Dakota permit last month after being denied last year.
The letter sent to Mazour targets her quote about the company in a newspaper article last year, in which she said: “Summit is using its power to take away democracy and people’s rights. They are in collusion with the Iowa Utilities Board to do so.”
Pipeline opponents have accused the three-member board — now called the Iowa Utilities Commission — of favoring Summit over the public in its permit proceedings, which were accelerated after Gov. Kim Reynolds appointed a new chair and the previous chair resigned from the panel.
They also allege the use of eminent domain to force landowners to host the company’s pipe violates their constitutional rights, which is the subject of ongoing litigation.
Summit said Mazour’s statements are “factually incorrect and defamatory” and caused the company to “suffer significant economic and legal harm.”
The letter was not more specific about the harms suffered, and a company spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trent Loos, a Nebraska farmer, said last week on his podcast “Across the Pond” that he had also been threatened by Summit in a letter dated the day before Mazour’s.
