A pipeline company filed hundreds of lawsuits against landowners. Now its project is threatened

MANSFIELD, S.D. (AP) — Jared Bossly was planting soybeans one spring night in 2023 on his 2,000-acre farm in South Dakota when he spotted a sheriff’s vehicle parked at the corner of his property. He had a hunch it wasn’t a social visit.

“I’m like, ‘Well, I doubt he’s just being a friendly neighbor, giving a guy a beer at eight o’clock at night,’” said Bossly, 43.

He was right. The sheriff’s deputy served him court papers. Summit Carbon Solutions, the company behind a massive proposed carbon pipeline, was suing Bossly to use his land for the project through eminent domain, which is the taking of private property with compensation to the owner.

“He gives me a stack of papers about like this,” Bossly said, stretching his hands several inches. “They started the process of suing us to take our land.”

Bossly is one of many landowners who were sued by Summit Carbon Solutions as it unleashed a barrage of eminent domain legal actions in South Dakota to obtain land for the nearly $9 billion pipeline spanning five Midwest states.

Lee Enterprises and The Associated Press reviewed hundreds of cases, revealing the great lengths the pipeline operator went to get the project built, only to be stymied in South Dakota by a groundswell of opposition from local farmers and landowners. The legal salvo generated so much outrage that South Dakota’s governor signed a bill into law in early March that bans the use of eminent domain for building carbon dioxide pipelines, putting the future of the project in doubt.

The review found that Summit brought 232 lawsuits against landowners across South Dakota, North Dakota and Iowa – including lawsuits seeking access to property for surveys. All 156 of the eminent domain actions were brought in South Dakota. Over the course of two days in late April 2023, the company filed 83 eminent domain lawsuits across the state.

Summit spokesperson Sabrina Zenor said the company’s priority is voluntary agreements and that the “vast majority of easements have been and continue to be secured voluntarily.”

“Condemnation is a legal tool available under the law, but it’s not our preferred approach,” Zenor said. “The numbers reflect that—we’ve reached agreements with thousands of landowners without litigation.”

The pipeline would span 2,500 miles (4,023-kilometers) across the five states and connect to 57 ethanol plants. The carbon dioxide produced by these plants would be captured and shuttled through the pipeline and ultimately stored underground in North Dakota, reducing carbon emissions and allowing the ethanol producers to market their fuel as less carbon intensive. The project would also allow ethanol producers and Summit to tap into federal tax credits.

Summit dispatched representatives to state legislatures, county commissions and regulatory boards to make what seemed like an easy sell in a region where the corn and ethanol industry typically has broad support. But Summit’s legal actions and encounters with farmers provoked passionate opposition in South Dakota. Some said their first encounter with Summit was looking out the window and spotting surveyors on their land, and that company representatives were quick to threaten litigation.

Landowners interviewed by Lee and AP described a range of aggressive financial offers made by Summit during the negotiations. One farmer declined an initial $80,000 offer for a 36-acre easement, and that offer grew to $350,000, which he also refused. Another said he turned down an offer north of $40,000.

Bossly, like some other landowners, battled with Summit in court for months to keep the company from surveying his farm in Brown County, a rural farming stretch of northeastern South Dakota. As Bossly tells it, he found out that Summit’s surveyors had shown up on his property in May 2023 after his wife, home recovering from gallbladder surgery, called him claiming that there were strangers inside the house. (In court filings, Summit’s surveyors said they knocked several times before walking to a different building.) Bossly eventually turned his tractor around for the slow, 10-mile drive home from a neighbor’s farm where he had been planting alfalfa.

The company accused him of threatening to kill the surveyors over the phone that day. That landed him in court in front of a judge, who had already ordered landowners not to interfere with Summit’s surveys. But the audience in the courtroom gallery underscored the larger anti-pipeline sentiment brewing in South Dakota: It was packed with farmers rallying in Bossly’s defense. Bossly denies that he made the death threat.

The backlash ultimately had major political consequences in the state. In last year’s primary election, a number of incumbent lawmakers were ousted by candidates opposed to the project.

It created an odd political dynamic in the region: Farmers in some of the reddest counties in America joining forces with environmentalists to block a pipeline that was designed to cater to a bedrock Republican constituency – Midwest corn farmers. Bossly proudly hangs a Donald Trump-JD Vance campaign banner from the ceiling of his shop.

“They did this all to themselves,” Brian Jorde, an attorney representing landowners, said of Summit. “Their legal plan was, ‘We will force them into submission because the lawsuits will break them.'”

Pipeline backed by the ethanol industry

Summit’s pipeline, first proposed in 2021, is viewed by the Midwest ethanol industry as a potential economic boon.

Nearly 40% of the nation’s corn crop is brewed into ethanol, which is blended into most gasoline sold in the U.S. With the rise of electric vehicles and less of the fuel additive powering cars, some Midwest farmers and the ethanol industry see passenger jet fuel as a potentially huge new market for ethanol. But under current rules, the process for turning ethanol into aviation fuel would need to emit less carbon dioxide to qualify for tax breaks intended to reduce greenhouse gases. Supporters see carbon capture projects such as Summit’s pipeline as a way to fight climate change and to help the ethanol industry.

Carbon capture involves separating carbon dioxide from the emissions of industrial facilities, such as ethanol plants, and pumping it underground where it is stored so it doesn’t contribute to climate change.

Carbon capture isn’t without critics. Some environmentalists question its effectiveness at large scale and say it allows the fossil fuels industry to continue unchanged.

Then there’s the Midwest farmers who oppose the project, questioning whether the pipeline would be safe in the event of a rupture and saying Summit trampled over their property rights.

Taking landowners to court

Some South Dakota landowners described troubling moments with Summit’s representatives. LeRoy Braun, a 69-year-old fifth-generation farmer in Spink County, said that “land acquisition people” working for Summit threatened to sue him during a March 2023 visit at his property after he refused to sign an easement agreement.

“Just as they were leaving, they said, ‘Well, if you don’t sign, we’re going to file eminent domain on you and you’re going to get nothing compared to what we’re offering you’,” Braun said. He said his neighbors described similar interactions.

The last time Summit’s representatives stopped by his property in late April 2023, they indicated that they wanted to continue a dialogue, Braun said. But a few hours after they left, a sheriff’s deputy served him with condemnation court papers.

“I just thought, ’Well, these are the most arrogant, bullying type of people I’ve ever dealt with,” Braun said.

In response to Braun’s claim that he was threatened with litigation, Summit spokesperson Zenor said that they “don’t condone threats or coercion” and the company “can’t confirm the exact wording” of the interaction. She added that the timing of the eminent domain lawsuit was “not a retaliatory act.”

Other landowners alleged that Summit had private armed security guards present during surveys. Craig Schaunaman, a farmer in Brown County and a former South Dakota legislator, said that during Summit’s survey of his land in May 2023, one of two on-site security guards was carrying a holstered pistol. “I thought it was uncalled for,” Schaunaman said.

Zenor said that Schaunaman’s account is “not consistent with our policies or our understanding of what occurred.” She added that “current policy does not include" armed security.

Such views aren’t uniform among South Dakota farmers. Walt Bones, a fourth-generation farmer in Minnehaha County and a former state secretary of agriculture, strongly supports the project for its potential economic benefits and said that his interactions with Summit’s representatives, who were interested in his land, were always respectful.

South Dakotans who oppose the project were dug-in from the start and spread “lies” and “overblown” safety concerns about the pipeline, Bones said.

When Summit started filing the condemnation lawsuits in April 2023, many South Dakota landowners, such as Bossly, weren’t surprised. What Bossly didn’t expect was how his run-ins with Summit would galvanize opposition.

After the threat allegations were detailed in court documents, Bossly’s name was everywhere – on television news and across social media. The company wanted a judge to hold him in contempt. During a May 2023 hearing, the judge declined to do so, but said Bossly must not “come within 100 yards” of Summit’s surveyors, according to a transcript of the hearing.

So Bossly largely stayed confined to the area of his workshop after Summit’s surveyors hauled large machinery to his South Dakota farmstead on June 20, 2023. Sheriff’s deputies were also present. The surveyors spent hours working on his farm. Photos and videos of the incident were posted online and circulated on social media.

“That day really kicked our opposition movement into gear because that’s when we really got support from all over the state,” said Ed Fischbach, a farmer in Spink County who helped organize the project’s opponents. “Even people that this pipeline doesn’t even affect were so appalled by what this company was doing that day.”

As for Bossly, life was different. A farmer who grows alfalfa, rye and other crops, Bossly became a standard bearer for the opposition to Summit’s pipeline. He was doing media interviews and speaking at public meetings about the project. Bossly got a standing ovation after speaking at a conference of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association – a group whose website states that a sheriff’s law enforcement power in a county is greater than that of any other official – in Las Vegas in 2024.

“I didn’t even know what Zoom was,” Bossly said. “And now, like, that’s two or three nights a week where I’m on Zoom with different people across the state or the nation.”

Summit kept filing eminent domain lawsuits in South Dakota until late August 2023. In seven cases, landowners signed easements after getting sued in condemnation, court records show. But after the South Dakota Public Utilities Commission rejected Summit’s permit application in September 2023, Summit “paused or dismissed” the legal actions, Zenor said.

Political fallout

By the end of 2024, Summit had secured approval for routes in Iowa and North Dakota, a leg in Minnesota and the underground storage. In Iowa, the commissioners who approved Summit’s route were appointed by Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican with strong backing from the state’s farming organizations. Although many Iowa landowners opposed the project, powerful groups such as the Iowa Corn Growers Association supported the proposal because of its promise to open new markets for corn-based ethanol. Summit was founded by Bruce Rastetter, a major Iowa donor to Republican political candidates.

But Summit faced hurdles in South Dakota, where it still lacked a permit and the state Supreme Court ruled in August that the company had not yet proved that it qualified for eminent domain power. In the November election, South Dakota voters rejected regulations that opponents said would deny local control over such projects and consolidate authority with state regulators. Supporters framed the regulations as a “landowner bill of rights.”

And the composition of the South Dakota Legislature had changed significantly after the 2024 primary, when voters elected new lawmakers who opposed Summit’s pipeline and its use of eminent domain, said Jim Mehlhaff, the Republican majority leader in the South Dakota Senate and a supporter of the pipeline. Lawmakers also were pressured by Summit’s vocal opponents to vote for the new eminent domain law, he said.

Mehlhaff said that the new law sends a signal that South Dakota is “not business friendly.”

“The legislature, you know, at the behest of what I would call the shrill minority, will cut your legs out,” he added.

The federal government’s approach to climate change also has changed dramatically since the pipeline was proposed. While former Democratic President Joe Biden increased tax incentives under the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to encourage carbon capture to slow climate change, Republican President Donald Trump has emphasized the need for more oil and gas drilling and coal mining.

It’s unclear how Summit will proceed in South Dakota. The company asked state regulators to suspend its permit application timeline. Zenor said the company is focused on advancing the project in states that “support investment and innovation” but added that Summit continues to “believe there is a path forward" in South Dakota.

But even some supporters of Summit say the company didn’t do itself any favors in South Dakota.

“Did they get off to a bad start? Did they soil their sheets? No question, absolutely,” Bones said. “I mean, I wouldn’t argue that a bit.”

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Kelety reported from Phoenix. AP writer Scott McFetridge in Des Moines, Iowa, contributed to this report.

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This story is a collaboration between Lee Enterprises and The Associated Press.