For four years, battles over private property rights have gridlocked state legislatures across the Midwest and stalled plans for a pipeline to transport liquified carbon dioxide from ethanol plants in the region.

In the background of this eminent domain standoff, Iowa-based Summit Carbon Solutions, the company behind the pipeline, has quietly shifted its focus from carbon sequestration to fossil fuel extraction.

Summit now says its pipeline will be used to drive domestic oil and gas production in a process known as enhanced oil recovery (EOR), which injects CO2 gas into wells. The gas mixes with oil in the rock pores to produce a thinner, easier-to-pump fluid, potentially doubling the amount of oil that can be extracted from a reservoir.

Just a few years ago, Summit’s website stated that the project wouldn’t be used for EOR. Instead, it advertised the pipeline as a way to cut emissions through underground sequestration. Soon after, Summit heralded it as a critical step in developing lower-carbon sustainable aviation fuel.

But as the company struggles to advance its pipeline out of a permitting quagmire and faces legal battles over property rights in Iowa, North Dakota and South Dakota, it finds itself in a starkly different energy market and political landscape.

The company’s messaging now parallels President Donald Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” policies, which seek to bolster American fossil fuel production while reversing progress on renewable energy and loosening restrictions on the greenhouse gas pollution damaging the climate.

Opponents of the pipeline have criticized Summit’s shift, arguing that the company will say whatever it takes to get the project over the finish line.

“It’s just whatever’s convenient for them in the moment,” said Jess Mazour, the conservation coordinator for the Iowa Chapter of the Sierra Club.

In late 2024, the organization filed a lawsuit challenging the Iowa Utilities Commission’s approval of Summit’s permit.

Summit did not respond to repeated email and phone requests for comment on the company’s pivot.

The Climate Pitch

Summit Carbon Solutions is a subsidiary of the Iowa-based private equity firm Summit Agricultural Group, which owns nearly 14,000 acres of farmland in the state. Both companies are founded and chaired by Iowa’s Bruce Rastetter, an agribusiness entrepreneur known for his frequent donations to state and federal Republican candidates and campaigns.

When Summit first filed a petition to construct its “Midwest Carbon Express” pipeline with the Iowa Utilities Commission, it was 2021, the first year of the climate-focused Biden administration. The company proposed transporting liquified CO2 from ethanol plants in the state to be stored underground in North Dakota.

At the time, the company’s argument for the pipeline was two-pronged: Carbon capture technology would cut greenhouse gas emissions and open new, lower-carbon fuel markets for corn and ethanol, boosting a struggling Midwest farm economy.

Using the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library, Inside Climate News analyzed how Summit’s language on the project website evolved over time.

In 2021, the site urgently called for net-zero CO2 emissions by 2050 and told visitors that “a dramatic increase in carbon capture and storage” would be critical to achieving net-zero and staying within 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming, a goal set in the Paris Agreement.

Through 2023, Summit continued to emphasize carbon neutrality, estimating that the project would prevent the release of 12 million metric tons of CO2 to the atmosphere every year.

For years, Summit advertised that the pipeline would have an annual emissions-reduction impact equivalent to taking 2.6 million vehicles off the road. In fact, the project arose largely out of a need to stay competitive in a changing automotive industry.

Rising U.S. demand for electric vehicles after 2018 put the squeeze on an already plateauing ethanol industry, the final destination for some 35 percent of all U.S. corn grown in 2025, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

From the beginning of the pipeline project, Summit argued that lowering ethanol’s carbon index was essential to keeping the fuel competitive in places with renewable fuel standards and protecting corn demand for farmers already struggling to make a profit. For a while, Summit wanted to compete in the sustainable aviation fuel market, which produces lower-emission jet fuel from low-carbon ethanol.

In 2023, Summit Agricultural Group launched another subsidiary, Summit Next Gen, and announced plans to develop the world’s largest ethanol-to-sustainable aviation fuel plant in Texas’ Port Houston. The company purchased a 60-acre site for the plant in September 2024 but have announced no updates about the project since then.

Lucrative Business

While Summit advertised its pipeline as a way for corn growers to tap the pocketbooks of increasingly climate-conscious consumers and transportation sectors, the approach also made sense for the company’s bottom line.

The federal government has long offered generous tax credits for carbon capture and storage technology in an effort to cut greenhouse gas emissions and jump-start development of the expensive and relatively unproven infrastructure.

Congress significantly expanded the tax credit for carbon sequestration in 2018 and again in 2022, offering up to $85 per metric ton of CO2 captured and permanently stored. Carbon captured for use in enhanced oil recovery also qualified for tax credits—though slightly smaller ones, up to $65 per metric ton.

For years, Summit was adamant that it would not pursue those smaller tax incentives. A “Get The Facts” page on Summit’s website told visitors from late 2022 through mid-2024 that the “Summit Carbon Solutions project will not be used for enhanced oil recovery.” Instead, at that time, the company emphasized the pipeline’s importance in reducing carbon emissions and limiting global warming.

Summit’s public-facing climate pitch was strategic, said Brian Jorde, a lawyer representing Midwest landowners in legal challenges to Summit’s permit applications. “They leaned into sequestration,” he said. “But they only designed that business model because that was the most lucrative at the time.”

In fact, after the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act beefed-up tax incentives for carbon capture, Summit signed deals to add 25 ethanol facilities to its proposed pipeline, bringing the total metric tons of CO2 to be transported each year to 16 million. All that CO2 under contract meant that Summit stood to recover as much as $1.5 billion in potential tax credits each year.

Abandoning Decarbonization

Early in Trump’s second term, however, the carbon conversation took a turn.

In a barrage of attacks on existing environmental and climate policy, Trump gutted incentives for renewable energy projects, invested in carbon-intensive energy sources like coal and oil, opened swaths of public land to mining and drilling, and reversed a key federal finding that linked greenhouse gas emissions to human health.

While simultaneously halting government action on what he’s called “the climate hoax” and kneecapping development of affordable renewables like solar and wind, Trump says he wants to usher in an era of American “energy dominance.”

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Trump’s sweeping One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025 also increased tax incentives for CO2 emissions captured and used in enhanced oil recovery. Now, whether a project captures carbon for permanent storage or to drive fossil fuel production, it receives the same credits.

In a complete departure from plans made just a few years ago, Summit has been quick to adapt to the new political realities. Early this year, the company scrubbed the phrases “climate change” and “global warming” from its website.

Instead, a new page announces Summit’s plans to become “the critical CO2 supply artery for America’s most prolific oil and gas basins,” the Powder River Basin in Montana and Wyoming, the Bakken Formation spanning parts of North Dakota and Montana and the Permian Basin of Texas and New Mexico.

These regions will depend on CO2 to sustain oil and gas production in the future, Summit wrote, and the pipeline will support “America’s long-term goal of energy dominance.”

For several years, Kathy Stockdale has driven over an hour from her home in Iowa Falls to the state Capitol every week to demand that lawmakers ban the use of eminent domain for carbon pipelines statewide. She bakes cookies for the lawmakers; they’re more likely to interact with the anti-pipeline advocates that way, she says.

In mid-January, Stockdale spoke with Rastetter, Summit’s CEO, who was visiting the Capitol with Jake Ketzner, a lobbyist for the company. Rastetter told Stockdale, who recorded the conversation, that Summit planned to use the carbon pipeline for both direct storage and enhanced oil recovery.

“Where are you planning on using it for enhanced oil recovery?” Stockdale asked during the conversation.

Both Rastetter and Ketzner responded, “Wyoming.”

Summit did not respond to questions from Inside Climate News about that conversation.

The company’s embrace of enhanced oil recovery is likely an economic decision made in response to Trump’s modification of federal tax credits, said Matt Fry, director of the ​​Center for Energy Regulation and Policy Analysis at the University of Wyoming and former policy and technical director at the Great Plains Institute, where he supported carbon capture, utilization and storage projects in the region.

“I think the new ‘energy dominance’ policy, if you will, probably plays a little bit into [Summit’s] new motivation.”

— Matt Fry, ​​Center for Energy Regulation and Policy Analysis

Though Summit emphasized permanent carbon storage in the project’s early years, EOR was never off the table for its executives, Fry said.

“If you’ve ever listened to them talk at conferences, or read some of their old interviews, they never said that they were opposed to it. They always said that it was an option and the market would kind of dictate things,” he said.

The tax credits that offer equal incentives for enhanced oil recovery and permanent storage projects have altered the market, said Fry. “I think the new ‘energy dominance’ policy, if you will, probably plays a little bit into [Summit’s] new motivation,” he said.

Fry doesn’t see Summit backing away from enhanced oil recovery now. Oil and gas are critical to making a dizzying array of everyday and specialty products, not just fuel for the transportation sector. He doesn’t see the drilling industry going away.

And if fossil fuel production is to continue, demand for CO2-enhanced oil recovery will likely grow as well, Fry said. As old basins produce less and less oil with traditional extraction technology, “I think we’re going to have to deploy EOR, from a production perspective,” he said. “I think that the market’s going to drive it.”

Jorde, the lawyer representing landowners, thinks that Summit in fact planned to pursue EOR from the outset of the pipeline, but that admitting so “wouldn’t have been the best path to getting the project approved.”

“Permission to Explore All Options”

While Summit changed their story online, a series of permitting roadblocks on the ground may have also propelled the pivot.

South Dakota banned the use of eminent domain for siting carbon pipelines in 2025, creating a hurdle in the Summit pipeline’s planned route to North Dakota. Further complicating the terrain, this month a North Dakota judge revoked a permit from Summit that would have allowed it to store CO2 underground in the state.

Those decisions, in turn, are imperiling Summit’s permit in Iowa which binds the pipeline to its original route. Summit petitioned the Iowa Utilities Commission in September 2025 to amend the terms of its permit and remove mentions of a specific route or destination.

Summit is now considering destinations in Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado and Kansas, Bret Dublinske, an attorney for the company, said in an Iowa district court hearing in September. “We’re asking for permission to explore all options,” he said.

Jorde does not believe the permit can be altered so substantially. “This obvious pivot … should completely invalidate that application,” Jorde said. “The Iowa Utilities Commission should just take that action without any motion, simply nullify the permit and then force them to start over and tell us who they really are once and for all.”

In a cease-and-desist letter that Summit Carbon Solutions sent to the Sierra Club’s Mazour in late 2024 over comments she’d made to members of the press, the company stated that $1 billion had already been invested in the project. Summit did not respond to multiple requests for an updated version of that figure.

Mazour isn’t sure the solution is as simple as Summit being forthright about plans for the pipeline.

“I don’t even know if they know what they’re going to do,” said Mazour. “I think they’re just trying to put all the cards out on the table and figure out which one might work and then go with that one.”