PIERRE, S.D. (KELO) — What happens on carbon dioxide pipelines is now up to the South Dakota Senate.
The state House of Representatives on Wednesday approved SB201 on a 40-30 vote. It could give CO2 carriers more certainty while requiring them to pay counties where their lines run.
Landowners crammed the House gallery to watch the two sides argue. The debate, at one hour and 40 minutes, was the longest of the 2024 session. The legislation now returns to the Senate for a decision whether to agree with the House version.
The Senate already has hearings scheduled for Thursday — Leap Day — on related pipeline bills HB1185 and HB1186 that the House previously approved. They call for landowners to receive financial payments for surveyors entering their properties and for granting pipeline easements.
House Republican leader Will Mortenson is prime sponsor of both of those bills. He also led the argument Wednesday for SB201. His bottom line on all three was that they would provide landowners with the strongest protections in the nation, while letting the state Public Utilities Commission decide whether local regulations are too burdensome.
”We can’t be a state that governs by protest or a state that governs by regulatory delay,” Mortenson said.
Favoring SB201 were ethanol producers and many of the farmers whose corn supplies those plants. Currently those plants release into the atmosphere the CO2 results from turning corn into fuel. Summit Carbon Solution wants to build a pipeline that would take the CO2 from the plants and deliver it to North Dakota, where it would be injected into the ground and produce more oil from fracking wells.
Opposing it were landowners from across much of the state, including from Brown, Edmunds and other counties that have adopted setback distances and safety regulations.
The bottom line for opponents is protecting local control. Lawmakers on their side submitted most of the 12 bills on pipelines this session. Currently the only ones left are the trio that Mortenson and Sente Republican leader Casey Crabtree have sponsored.
Republican Rep. Karla Lems led off the opposition’s side of the argument Wednesday. She said the Legislature gave the PUC the authority to issue pipeline permits and should leave the agency alone. The PUC last year held a lengthy hearing on a permit application for a CO2 line proposed by Navigator and ultimately rejected it because the planned route couldn’t get through several counties.
Lems was one of the people who testified against the Navigator line during the PUC hearing. “I would argue that our process is not broken. In fact, our process worked,” she said Wednesday. “What you have before you is an attempt to fix something that is not broken.”
On Tuesday morning, dozens of citizens wearing blue sweatshirts with the logo of ethanol producer POET had spread out across the House floor and in the Capitol’s third- and fourth-floor hallways, catching lawmakers to tell them to support SB201.
“This is the premier success story in our state and we can’t take it for granted,” Republican Rep. Drew Peterson, a farmer-rancher and co-sponsor of SB201, said about the success of the ethanol industry during the debate Wednesday. “They say we need this pipeline. I believe them.”
Republican Rep. Liz May disagreed. “We pick and choose on local control — do we do that because of money roaming around in the hallway with lobbyists?” she said. “These big corporations are coming in and bullying us. That’s what they’re doing.”
As House Speaker Hugh Bartels wrapped up work an hour later in a half-empty chamber, he noted that 31 representatives had spoken or yielded their time during the pipeline debate. He said that might be a record and complimented the behavior of the people watching from the gallery and the conduct of lawmakers on the floor.
“You should all be proud of yourselves,” he said. The remaining lawmakers responded with applause.