Farmers face cost of the green agenda
The land easement acquisition woman who knocked on Wayne Hanson’s door had a box of doughnuts.
She arrived without an appointment, walked past the front desk of the nursing home complex, and stopped at Hanson’s independent-living senior apartment.
Hanson, 96, let her in and they had a conversation about his Webster County, Iowa farm and how Summit Carbon Solutions wants to pay him around $30,000 for an easement on his property, a long, diagonal swath cutting a field in half, from corner to corner, to install a pipeline. Not for natural gas. Not for oil. The land is needed, the woman explained, as part of the Midwest Carbon Express, a 2,000-mile web of pipelines in five states: Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, South Dakota, and North Dakota. The company needs easements from landowners for all 2,000 miles.
The project will pull carbon from more than 30 ethanol plants, liquify it, and send it to North Dakota where it will be buried in rock about a mile underground to stay permanently. It is a “carbon capture, utilization, and storage” (CCUS) project, a green initiative to help save the earth from excess carbon emissions.
By allowing an easement for a pipeline on his land, Wayne Hanson was told he would be doing so much good for the environment and get that money in about 10 days. She laid the contract out in front of him. Just. Sign. Here.
But the doughnuts were not convincing. He said no, just like he had numerous times in phone calls from the company and during the last unannounced visit, when two other people came to his apartment with high pressure and a contract.
That is about how Wayne Hanson described it to his son, Dennis Hanson, a recently retired Lutheran minister who has power of attorney over his father’s affairs.
A receptionist at Summit Carbon Solutions took messages from The Epoch Times, but no one from the company returned calls for comment on this story.
The Hayek family has land next to the Hanson farm. Allen Hayek, 66, and his son Austin Hayek, 36, farm their own land and Hanson’s land through a lease.
They first heard about the Summit project through an informational meeting presented in Webster County in the fall of 2021. They started getting mail and then the phone calls; all day long, every two hours, for a week, on both Allen Hayek’s and his wife Chris’s cell phones. He doesn’t know how they got the numbers.
The calls still come. The company has sent registered mail, which the couple refuses. An easement person knocked on the door with a big packet of papers, as recently as two weeks ago. But despite an offer of around $50,000, they are a hard no.
By Beth Brelje
