North Dakota Wants Your Carbon, But Not Your Climate Science

Jason Erickson is a landman on the ranches and farms of western North Dakota. Traditionally, the title refers to someone who brokers the deals wildcatters need to drill for oil on private land. But Erickson belongs to a new breed in that old line. What he does is different, an inverse. He seals land deals so that atmosphere-warming carbon dioxide—hundreds of millions of tons of it—can be pumped deep underneath.

It’s been four generations since Erickson’s family first arrived in North Dakota, and their piece of prairie is still littered with remnants of his homesteading ancestors: a windblown shack built by his great-grandfather, the boxcar where his grandparents lived as newlyweds. A more recent addition, a 6,400-foot-deep shaft on his property called Archie, after his grandfather, burrows into the same quarter-section where his grandparents parked a wagon to stake their claim almost a century ago. If all goes according to plan, the well will be used to monitor a vast underground reservoir of CO2 that could rest there forever.

This carbon-sequestration project, which Erickson first began peddling to his neighbors more than three years ago, would be the largest of its kind in the US, an $8.9 billion venture by Iowa-based Summit Carbon Solutions LLC. Using carbon capture—until recently a fringe technology, and one that’s still largely shunned in environmentalist circles—Summit aims to pool emissions from 57 ethanol plants across the region and lock them more than a mile into the Earth, capitalizing on a federal tax credit that pays companies to bury CO2.

The more controversial part of Summit’s plan is a 2,500-mile web of pipeline known as the Midwest Carbon Express. Originating at ethanol plants in Iowa, the pipeline would wend its way north and west, gathering emissions at biorefineries in Nebraska and Minnesota before stretching through South Dakota and eventually reaching its terminus west of the Missouri River, beneath the prairie surrounding Erickson’s land. The pipeline plan has embittered farmers, environmentalists and land-rights defenders across the region, prompting a populist alliance that threatens to block the whole enterprise.

At the pipeline’s endpoint, though, on the ranches beneath which Summit hopes to bury its CO2, the plan is broadly accepted. In fact, some consider it a way to almost stop time. For North Dakota, whose economy depends heavily on oil and coal, the transition to cleaner fuels poses an existential threat. If plans such as Summit’s work, the region’s carbon-capture advocates attest, life here might go on basically as it has for decades.

“I’m not out here saying we’re saving the planet,” Erickson told me. “I want to sustain the fossil fuel industry, and, to me, this is a way we’re going to do it.”

Erickson is stocky, broad-shouldered and a smooth talker. He left the ranch where he grew up to work in the oil fields for more than two decades, through the height of North Dakota’s fracking boom, but returned home to his cows a few years ago. Now 54, he has a soft, neighborly face and a Northern Plains accent so heavy it sounds almost Irish. Both have been assets to him in the job for Summit. Leasing is often conducted over beers or country cooking.

The work can still be taxing. In the project’s early days, Erickson and a small team of other Summit recruits—mostly neighbors and former schoolmates of his—worked 20 hours at a stretch to blanket their area in carbon storage leases, agreements that now cover 145,000 acres. Erickson often logged hundreds of miles a day on the grid of section-line roads surrounding his home. He broached Summit’s idea with neighbors in their driveways, at the foot of tractors and at kitchen tables. He preferred to do it face-to-face, his wife, Angie, told me, the “cowboy way.”

One neighbor, a friend Erickson recruited into the original Summit team, recounted that Erickson would stop at her place several times a day to drop off contracts before hitting the road again, off to another kitchen table. His staid Dakota charm never faltered. But if he had to accept one more caramel roll, he told her after lumbering through her door at the end of a long day, he was going to explode.

Of all the climate solutions at America’s disposal, carbon capture might be the most polarizing. The environmental left, in organizations such as the Sierra Club and Food & Water Watch, has rejected it as a costly, potentially unsafe tool designed to prolong the life of legacy fuels like ethanol, coal and oil. Some on the right, meanwhile, despise carbon capture for a different, entirely incompatible reason: their stubborn conviction that climate change is not, in fact, a problem.

But from its announcement date in February 2021, the Midwest Carbon Express seemed to have the backing of everyone who mattered in the region. Summit’s parent company, Summit Agricultural Group, is chaired by Bruce Rastetter, a hog farming and ethanol magnate once hailed by Politico as the “real Iowa kingmaker.” Harold Hamm, an oil-industry liaison to President-elect Donald Trump and the wildcatter credited with pioneering North Dakota’s shale oil revolution, was an early investor through his company, Continental Resources Inc. Summit’s top lobbyist is the former chief of staff to Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds, a frequent beneficiary of Rastetter’s political contributions, and Iowa’s former governor, Terry Branstad, serves as the company’s senior policy adviser.

None of the project’s proponents has a more aspirational vision than North Dakota’s two-term governor, Doug Burgum. A former Microsoft Corp. exec who brings an enthusiastic nerdiness to the state’s unpolished political scene, Burgum is obsessive about carbon capture. He’s become the technology’s chief evangelist in North Dakota.

Burgum’s most provocative expression of this zeal came at an oil conference more than three years ago in Bismarck. Speaking ahead of the president of the American Petroleum Institute, the governor threw down a surprising gauntlet, appealing to his audience of oil producers to make his state carbon neutral by 2030. That deadline is sooner than the climate targets of President Joe Biden’s administration (2050), the country of Sweden (2045) and the state of California (also 2045).

But North Dakota’s pathway to carbon neutrality, Burgum assured the room, wouldn’t require phasing out oil, gas or coal. The state, he predicted, could become a mass importer of carbon dioxide, bringing in greater volumes than its coal stacks and oil field flares emitted. Burgum suggested that North Dakota could even go on to become America’s first “carbon negative” state, with the greenhouse gas not only offsetting but reenergizing oil production, thanks to a process known as enhanced oil recovery.

This technique involves pumping CO2 down declining wells to juice out more oil. The industry has been doing it in conventional wells for decades, but perfecting the approach in shale fields such as North Dakota’s remains, as Burgum put it, “the biggest prize.” North Dakota regulators estimate that enhanced recovery could double the state’s extractable reserves and extend the productive life of its plateauing oil fields by two decades.

The notion of sequestering emissions only to pump more oil is blasphemous to climate advocates. But since Burgum outlined his vision in the spring of 2021, carbon capture and storage has assumed a prominent, if contested, position in discussions of US climate policy. Later that year, the bipartisan infrastructure bill allotted close to $12 billion for carbon-capture tech. The Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s historic climate bill, reformed and expanded the federal tax credit that pays for carbon storage, boosting the amount the federal government will pay for every metric ton of CO2 buried, to $85 from $50. For direct air capture, the logical endpoint of carbon-capture tech, the incentive is bigger: $180 per metric ton. In 2022, Biden’s Department of Energy set aside $3.5 billion in seed funding to generate an industry that could suck CO2 straight from the atmosphere. (The basic idea involves giant fans.) This October, the Energy Department’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management—now under the direction of a North Dakota native—doled out a half-billion dollars for carbon storage efforts around the country, including almost $50 million to support a coal plant trying to decarbonize near Erickson’s ranch.

Industry is also moving ahead. In late 2021, Exxon Mobil Corp. bid on about 100 shallow-water leases in the Gulf of Mexico, a signal of its apparently serious interest in storing carbon beneath the seabed there. Last year Exxon purchased the niche Texas-based operator Denbury Inc. for $4.9 billion, giving it a pioneer of enhanced oil recovery and the country’s largest inventory of CO2 pipelines. Big Oil is now so heavily invested in the approach, the Wall Street Journal reported, that it warned former President Donald Trump’s campaign against dismantling the Inflation Reduction Act, particularly sections of the climate law that subsidize carbon capture and carbon removal. Exxon has projected that the market for capturing and burying CO2 will balloon into the trillions of dollars in the coming decades.

Climate scientists differ on what role carbon capture should play in US decarbonization. The general consensus, though, is that the country won’t neutralize its emissions without deploying the technology at substantial scale. The Energy Department projects that by 2050 the US will need to capture 400 million to 1,800 million metric tons of CO2 annually, more than 80 times what the country can capture today.

The question, then, is where to put it.

North Dakota is one of few places in the US where these storage projects are moving forward. Not coincidentally, it’s one of only three states cleared by the federal government to handle carbon-burial permitting themselves rather than having to rely on the much slower Environmental Protection Agency. The others are Wyoming, which has tried forcing utilities to invest in carbon capture to prolong the operation of local coal plants (and where one of the world’s largest carbon removal ventures recently folded), and Louisiana, which got clearance in January but faces intense community backlash. North Dakota’s regulatory independence has allowed it to approve eight different carbon injection wells since 2021—not counting Summit’s three storage sites, which are in an early stage of review. Across 47 other states in that span, the EPA has greenlighted only two.

To Burgum—who is reportedly in contention to be Trump’s energy czar, a new position centered on boosting fossil fuels and cutting regulations across agencies—it seems as if people outside North Dakota are finally seeing the potential of carbon capture. Beyond simply burying CO2 to offset emissions, he told me in a recent interview, this tech can power an economic boom in North Dakota. Companies might, for example, locate petrochemical plants and power-hungry data centers in the state, motivated by the idea of storing or selling their emissions. He even mused about feeding CO2 into greenhouses to grow fruits through the dead of winter. The two-term governor didn’t seek reelection this year, and though some of the highest-profile energy projects he’s courted for North Dakota have so far struggled or failed to materialize, he says his hopes for carbon capture are even higher today than they were when he first laid out his carbon neutrality goal. Since then, he claims, the amount of private-sector investment considering coming to North Dakota has ballooned to $60 billion.

It can be dumbfounding for Burgum and other proponents that anyone would oppose such a straightforward fix to their problems. After all, they contend, what’s so bad about fossil fuels if they don’t come with carbon emissions? And what’s not to like about a self-contained system that could allow North Dakota to continue extracting and burning hydrocarbons long into the country’s clean-fuel transition?

Young people today, Burgum likes to say, have been taught to see carbon as “the devil element on the periodic table.” But North Dakota has struck the “geologic jackpot”—lucky enough to have both rich reserves of oil and coal and a seemingly limitless underground vault for burying their by-product. The governor often points to a calculation by University of North Dakota geologists that the state’s subsurface has the potential to absorb 50 years’ worth of US energy-driven carbon emissions.

“We’ll take all the CO2 that people will ship us,” Burgum said.

The path of ancient glaciers through the upper Great Plains flattened North Dakota’s eastern half into a fertile valley while leaving its west—divided roughly along the Missouri River—creased with hills, buttes and inhospitable coteaux. “Here is where the map should fold,” wrote John Steinbeck about the Missouri in his book Travels With Charley. “Here is the boundary between east and west.”

Something similar might be said of the earth below. An underground bowl called the Williston Basin stretches beneath North Dakota, shallow in the east and gaining depth and variation to the west. The same properties that have trapped oil in this basin for eons also make it promising for burying carbon, says Charles Gorecki, chief executive officer of the University of North Dakota’s Energy & Environmental Research Center. Once an arm of the Energy Department, Gorecki’s lab today employs more than 200 people on a glitzy campus in Grand Forks. The organization has led much of the carbon-capture research in the region and often works hand in glove with North Dakota’s energy industries and Republican leadership.

The process for getting CO2 into underground rock formations isn’t all that complicated. As Gorecki is quick to say, energy companies have been doing it on a smaller scale for decades to enhance oil production: Funnel the exhaust from a power plant or factory through a series of tanks; use heat and chemicals to separate the CO2; apply pressure, condensing the greenhouse gas to a quasi-liquid state; ship it—by truck, by boat, by pipeline—to a well much like those used for pumping oil; and shoot it underground.

The companies pursuing carbon capture insist CO2 will remain in its underground vaults forever. But forever is a long time. Carbon storage hasn’t been tested at anywhere near the scale scientists expect is necessary to reverse climate change, and the consequences of being wrong could be deadly. Stored CO2, which will be under significant pressure underground, could find a way out of its chamber—as happened recently at an Illinois injection site—and escape through, for example, old oil wells. A more troubling possibility is a mishap at an injection site. Because CO2 is denser than air, it sinks to the ground, rushing into low places where it could asphyxiate people or livestock. Detractors bring up the story of the 1986 Lake Nyos disaster in Cameroon, in which, for reasons still unknown, a volcanic lake exploded and released a reservoir of pent-up CO2. Noxious gas washed over the land, suffocating villagers in their sleep and leaving more than 1,700 people dead. This tragedy is loosely retold in the 2010 disaster flick CO2, which predicts today’s carbon-capture politics with surprising acuity.

Still, such an outcome seems far-fetched in North Dakota, where the geology has many safeguards. Most of the ventures looking to bury CO2 in North Dakota have targeted a geologic layer a mile beneath the prairie, where ancient dunes now compose a porous sandstone formation known as the Broom Creek. Like water in a sponge, condensed CO2 would spread through the Broom Creek. The layer of shale sitting atop the formation would serve as a ceiling. More layers of impermeable rock above that one would provide a fail-safe. Eventually—hundreds of years on, perhaps—the buried CO2 would harden into rock, becoming part of the Earth.“That argument is always going to be there, that you don’t know 100%” what will happen in these underground formations, Richard Suggs, a geologist with North Dakota’s Department of Mineral Resources, told me. But geologists have relied on similar types of modeling and projections to understand the behavior of oil and gas for decades. And there are fewer possible escape valves for the CO2 in the country where Summit wants to bury emissions, because it isn’t punctured by old oil wells like the lands farther west.

Perhaps more worrisome are the pipelines needed to get CO2 to viable storage sites. Today, the US has a little more than 5,000 miles of CO2 pipeline, a point often cited by carbon-capture proponents to emphasize the technology’s safety. (This infrastructure, used almost exclusively to increase oil extraction, includes one line that has delivered sequestered CO2 from just north of Erickson’s home to Saskatchewan oil fields for almost 25 years.) Still, today’s carbon transport network covers a fraction of the as much as 96,000 miles the Energy Department projects will be necessary to meet net-zero goals. And while a CO2 pipeline break has never killed anyone in the US, federal authorities have tracked an average of around four CO2 pipeline incidents a year since 2004, according to one recent report.

The most alarming past incident came four years ago near the town of Satartia, Mississippi, where a CO2 pipeline ruptured, washing much of the area in gas. Dozens of people were hospitalized, some dazed and having trouble breathing, others knocked unconscious. Last year a leak along that same pipeline released more than 100,000 gallons of gaseous CO2 in a southwest Louisiana parish, prompting a shelter-in-place advisory until operators arrived for repairs.

Safety aside, carbon capture still has a long way to go to prove it’s worth the cost. Efforts like Summit’s represent the lowest-hanging fruit, because siphoning CO2 off ethanol refineries is efficient and relatively cheap. The Summit project was lucrative even before the Inflation Reduction Act almost doubled the incentive for carbon storage.

Adapting the technology to other kinds of legacy fuel operations, meanwhile, can be prohibitively expensive. The operators of a coal-fired power plant near Erickson’s home have hesitated for years over whether to go ahead with a $2 billion carbon-capture retrofit, even though the plant sits atop prime geology for burying its emissions, and despite hundreds of millions of dollars in state and federal funds pledged toward the effort. If the project moves forward, the process would sap a substantial share of the plant’s energy output while still leaving at least some of its CO2 to escape into the atmosphere. ( Minnkota Power Cooperative Inc., the utility exploring the plan, said in an email that its system would capture about 74% of the plant’s total emissions.) Many of the large-scale efforts that have launched around the world have struggled. A marquee multibillion-dollar carbon-capture venture in Australia, operated by Chevron Corp.—the company credited with pioneering the first commercial CO2 injections more than 50 years ago—has been hampered for years by delays and technical problems. Lately, the plant has sequestered less than half of the volume it was built for.

Gorecki, the University of North Dakota research center CEO, argues that tech advancements will steadily make carbon capture a more attractive solution for greenhouse gas emissions. Like Burgum, he points to the potential benefits for North Dakota’s oil production. Billions of barrels still trapped beneath the state remain unreachable without massive injections of CO2 to boost extraction. As scientists plead for global decarbonization, Gorecki says North Dakota is different. “We are starved,” he told me. “It’s kind of a laughable thing to think about. We don’t have nearly enough carbon dioxide.”

For almost its whole history, the author Clay Jenkinson has argued, North Dakota has existed at the margins of the American consciousness. If there’s one unifying tension in its economic success—“feeding and fueling the world,” as a state motto goes—it’s the struggle to stave off the influence of outsiders who’ve dreamed up novel futures and uses for the upper Great Plains. Some North Dakotans are still aggrieved about a proposal by two academics in the late 1980s to empty expanses of the Great Plains and turn the open country into a “Buffalo Commons,” a place for the continent’s diminished bison population to live and thrive.

This peripheral status, I’ve found, is otherwise largely welcomed. As long as America remains uninterested in the Dakotas, the logic goes, life here might continue more or less as it always has. But the state’s isolation seems to be breaking down under the new climate economy.

As some of North Dakota’s leaders point out, what anyone does or doesn’t believe about climate change is no longer the point. “People can disagree whether it’s real or not,” Republican state Representative Anna Novak told me. “But, unfortunately, I think we sort of lost that argument.” We were talking at a coffee shop near Novak’s home in the coal-country town of Hazen. Novak, a climate-science skeptic, comes from a family of miners; she was elected to the legislature in 2022 after vigorously opposing the closure of the state’s largest coal-fired power plant, a 1,150-megawatt beast called Coal Creek Station. She moderates a Facebook page named Faces of North Dakota Coal, which is part community group, part platform for taking shots at renewable energy sources. Its members like to point out that the electricity produced at Coal Creek Station—which the Burgum administration rescued in part through a multibillion-dollar plan to capture and bury its CO2 emissions—runs down a transmission line and out of state, helping keep the lights on for liberals in Minneapolis.

“I’ve come to the realization, probably in the last three years, that if we don’t adapt, somebody’s going to make that decision for us,” Novak says. But as far as she’s concerned, that doesn’t mean an end to polluting fuels such as coal, whatever climate advocates might expect. Carbon capture has offered North Dakota another way, she told me—a chance “to beat them at their own game.” Just about everyone in the area has family at nearby coal mines or power plants, and carbon capture’s success might protect their jobs.

Burgum tends to avoid saying exactly what he thinks of climate change. A Stanford University business school graduate whose associates include the billionaire climate hawk Bill Gates, the governor has said his support for the Summit pipeline is purely “about markets” and “has nothing to do with climate change.” His job as governor is to help expand his state’s economy, he told me, not to have “an ideological opinion” on climate change. Whether or not emissions are warming the planet, Burgum considers CO2 an opportunity.

So it was a shock, in August 2023, when state utility regulators delivered the first big blow to the Summit pipeline. For months, carbon-capture opponents had packed pipeline hearings in the state and across the region, turning mind-numbing regulatory depositions into a new front in a war over Midwestern property rights. CO2 pipeline safety and the possible use of eminent domain to push the project through suddenly became an urgent cause for Midwestern landowners. For the politically connected Summit, these crowds might have looked like little more than a nuisance. Then, to the surprise of both sides, the North Dakota Public Service Commission denied the company a permit for the 320 miles of pipeline it hoped to build in the state, citing a lack of information on the implications for sensitive cultural, wildlife and geologic areas, and questioning why the company was so set against alternative routes. It was an earthquake decision from a generally business- (and pipeline-) friendly authority. North Dakota’s rejection was followed by similar outcomes in other jurisdictions, first in South Dakota and then in a northeast Nebraska county.

Landowner consternation over pipelines is nothing new, but carbon-sequestration plans in the Midwest have created something stranger: an alliance between climate change deniers and environmental activists. This unlikely partnership has found common ground in concerns over eminent domain, but it has also produced its share of awkward moments. Eliot Huggins, until recently an organizer with the Dakota Resource Council, one of the few environmental groups based in North Dakota, informed me that one of his collaborators in the fight against Summit claimed to have friends in the right-wing militia group the Oath Keepers. Once, on a phone call, the man professed to be “ready for a war with blood” and said he was mobilizing tens of thousands of insurgents to help block the pipeline, Huggins said. “But, like, same sentence, though—‘Thank you so much for all your hard work. I appreciate you so much.’ ”

Other pipeline opponents are prone to conspiracy theories, such as one involving Chinese participation in a fund invested in the Summit project. “China has a 100-year plan to take over America. We’re in year 71,” Republican state Senator Jeff Magrum informed me matter-of-factly one morning after a Summit hearing in Bismarck. The standoff in Nevada between the US Bureau of Land Management and the Bundy family of cattle ranchers 10 years ago gets discussed “in the background,” a right-wing South Dakota pastor named Matthew Monfore told me. “There’s a lot of caution” to avoid anything rash or violent. At the same time, if the pipeline gets clearance, “if your elected leaders don’t stand up for you, do you?” he asked. “That is on everybody’s mind.”

For all of its strange alliances and fringe ideas, this anti-carbon-capture coalition has proved politically potent. In April the North Dakota GOP came within two votes of adopting a resolution condemning the state’s carbon-capture boosterism as “fascism” capitalizing on “the false premise of a looming climate apocalypse.” (Although Burgum has closely aligned himself with Trump on the national stage, campaigning unsuccessfully to become his vice president, the governor has a strained relationship with the right flank of his party at home.) In South Dakota, this year’s GOP primaries were a bloodbath for incumbent legislators—14 lost, a result the news outlet South Dakota Searchlight attributed in part to backlash against establishment Republicans’ positions on the pipeline. Some of the unseated Republicans had backed the misleadingly named “Landowner Bill of Rights,” part of a compromise aimed at making way for Summit’s pipeline. Thanks to petitioning by pipeline opponents, this proposal went to South Dakota voters on their November ballots, and they rejected it.

Hoping to meet some of the conservative landowners who’d become standard bearers for this carbon-capture opposition movement, I set out one July day from Bismarck to a convention of anti-pipeline hardliners in Iowa. The drive took me through much of the same country that Summit’s pipeline could someday span.

When I arrived at a Best Western in Fort Dodge, Iowa, a sign in the parking lot confirmed I was in the right place. “NO EMINENT DOMAIN,” it read. “NO DEADLY CARBON PIPELINES.” Inside, a few hundred people waited. On a stand outside the meeting room, visitors could sort through stacks of a magazine called The New American, whose headlines decried “The UN’s New World Religion,” “False Predictions on Climate Change” and “Biden’s ESG Agenda.” Or they could buy copies of the memoir of one of the event’s organizers, the disgraced former Iowa Representative Steve King.

The meeting was more strategy session than political rally. Lawmakers from North Dakota, South Dakota and Iowa mingled, comparing notes on legislative sessions in which carbon pipeline proposals had rivaled culture war bills for attention. One South Dakota farmer battling Summit in court, a square-jawed man with a silver mullet named Jared Bossly, moved the crowd with his denial of charges that he’d threatened to kill the company’s surveyors on his land. King delivered a rousing speech appealing to landowners to fight the pipeline in county commission meetings, before regulators and in court. “Pass no battle up,” he urged. “Bog this thing down as hard as you can.”

Near the end of the day, Trent Loos, a radio host and sixth-generation rancher from Nebraska, went to the front of the room. A longtime property rights defender who served as an agriculture adviser in the first Trump administration, Loos is something of a celebrity in conservative agricultural circles. He sported his typical look: walrus mustache, orange neckerchief, wide-brimmed cowboy hat.

Like the speakers before him, Loos hammered on the infringements of eminent domain and the hazards of living near a CO2 pipeline. In Loos’ telling, Summit’s pipeline is the product of a secretive globalist land grab, a deep-seated plot whose roots reach all the way to the United Nations. More than anyone before him, though, he spelled out an environmental basis for right-wing opposition to carbon capture, warning his audience against what he called “the big lie”: that an accumulation of human emissions in the atmosphere is warming the planet. “I’m most concerned about the lie that we’re being told about greenhouse gases, which improve planet health every day,” he said, “and we’re being told we gotta tie ’em up.”

I was struck, leaving Fort Dodge, by how uncompromising the crowd had been. There seemed to be a fault line among those aligned with traditional energy sources. Many of the oil and coal proponents I’d met in North Dakota have become full-throated evangelists for carbon capture, even if they don’t readily concede that the CO2 they aim to capture is altering the climate. Almost everyone I met in Fort Dodge was a purist who balked at any concessions to the energy transition.

Although Erickson has managed to get almost all his neighbors on board with Summit’s project, a few remain unconvinced. The person who’s done perhaps the most to rally dissent over carbon sequestration in the area is an industrial contractor named Kurt Swenson. A burly man with a silver beard, wide eyes and pheasant feathers tattooed on his forearm, Swenson lives on a rise in the land a few miles west of the Ericksons’ ranch home. Not long after Summit first announced its venture more than three years ago, Swenson distributed unsigned letters across the vast area where Summit has proposed to store carbon, warning neighbors that the company’s leases offered a raw deal. Today he leads a small band of holdouts who have refused to sign over their land for carbon disposal.

Swenson is quick to say he doesn’t oppose Summit’s plan, but he wants his neighbors to know that this might be only the beginning. Summit’s leases promise landowners a starting royalty of 50¢ for every metric ton of CO2 injected beneath their land, escalating 10% in 2026 and every five years after that—a fraction of the $85 the company would collect from the feds. Who’s to say Summit’s are the only prospectors in the area, Swenson asked me over lunch one afternoon. How do we know they aren’t scrambling to lease underground tracts at bargain prices before anyone realizes just how valuable they’ve become? Just that morning, he’d heard from a nearby landowner about a direct air capture company leasing parcels not far to the south.

More than 90% of the area Summit needs for its carbon injection plans is signed on, well above the 60% threshold North Dakota requires for the project’s storage component to go forward. CO2 doesn’t recognize fence lines, of course, and if the state’s oil and gas industry regulators approve Summit’s injection plans, the company could inject beneath Swenson’s land with or without his permission. But Swenson might still represent a threat to North Dakota’s carbon sink ambitions via a lawsuit he and a group called the Northwest Landowners Association are pursuing against the state’s carbon storage laws. If successful, their case could ensure that the rights to property thousands of feet underground are treated much the same as the rights to the land on the surface—an outcome that would likely leave companies trying to bury CO2 entangled in costly skirmishes over eminent domain.

Swenson and a team from Summit came together again this June in the fluorescent-lit conference room of the North Dakota Oil & Gas Division, where the company was asking state oil regulators for the permits it needs to inject CO2. Swenson vented frustration that his state has caved to the agenda of the Green New Deal, the nonbinding Congressional resolution that has become a byword for left-wing climate demands. He suggested Summit’s plan was aligned with a Biden administration executive order aimed at conserving land, an order that some in the Great Plains have interpreted as a massive federal land grab. He also pointed to $300,000 earmarked last year by the North Dakota legislature for a “carbon-capture education” program, a public-relations offensive meant to counter dissent to the Summit project. A more apt investment, Swenson said, might have been in billboards that could deliver a blunter message. “North Dakota is open for CO2 disposal,” these signs might read. “Don’t worry, your citizens are too stupid to understand it.”

Swenson’s testimony injected a new tension into the proceedings. To that point, technical discussion about the security of North Dakota’s geologic formations had lulled some in the room to sleep. The tenor changed when Swenson lashed out at the state’s top oil regulator, who’s among the most influential people in Bismarck, arguing that North Dakota’s efforts to store emissions under the lands of unwilling property owners verged on “tyrannical.” If Summit wanted to bury CO2 beneath his land, Swenson made clear, it was going to face a fight. “The state can try and take it,” he said. “You’re going to end up taking it from my cold, dead hands.”

Swenson told me that in some cases, the carbon storage plans have driven wedges between family members and longtime neighbors. Where North Dakota niceties prevail on the surface, tension has accumulated like an underground current. “You’re friendly,” as Swenson put it, “but you’re not a friend.” He recalls an early meeting with Summit, when he was caught off guard to see Erickson climbing out of a car in his driveway. Swenson says the two men’s families have butted up against one another for decades, and he’d asked Summit not to involve Erickson in negotiations over his family’s land. The conversation that day was cordial, but afterward Swenson fired off an email. He asked that Summit never bring Erickson onto his land again.

It’s been almost a year since Erickson had any work to do for Summit. The vast majority of the land in his coverage area is now signed up for carbon storage, and he can only watch as the prospects for the pipeline intermittently dim and brighten. Burgum, the state’s most prominent carbon-capture advocate, will complete his term as governor before the end of the year. (If he doesn’t get tapped as Trump’s energy czar, he’s seen as a contender for other cabinet jobs, like secretary of energy.) In August, Summit won a long-awaited permit in Iowa. The company plans to reapply for a permit in South Dakota, and North Dakota regulators are rethinking their rejection after the company agreed to push its pipeline route farther north of Bismarck.

But Erickson’s ranch keeps him busy, and after a burger and a beer one afternoon, he invited me to ride along while he cut hay. We’d managed just one out-and-back across the field, rocking back and forth over the uneven earth, when an old Nissan SUV pulled through the fence posts up ahead. “I get one round done, and then this happens. I get nothing done,” Erickson groused. In truth, he welcomed the interruption; he’d taken the job with Summit in part so he could spend more time talking with his neighbors.

We hopped down from the tractor while the neighbor, an older man with a close-cut beard, remained in his car. Erickson explained that I was a reporter writing about the pipeline. The neighbor joked about how Summit had cut “that yo-yo” out, gesturing toward Swenson’s home in the distance. Erickson laughed and brushed off the comment. Conversation turned to fishing, farming and family inheritance. The men agreed they weren’t after money. “I worked 22 years in the oil field to get back here, and I’m not leaving,” Erickson said.

After he and I had climbed back into the cab of the tractor, I asked what he thought about working for a company that’s been labeled by some of his fellow Plains conservatives as a vehicle for a liberal climate hoax and a front for the Green New Deal. Erickson said those dissenters have it backward—that energy and agriculture are under assault. “They should give us a tag that we’re trying to fight the Green New Deal,” he said, “that we’re trying to combat it. Because the Green New Deal wants no coal mines. No fossil fuels at all…. I guarantee you, I wouldn’t be working for Summit if everybody kept saying, ‘We’re saving the world. We’re saving the planet,’ ” he continued. “Because that’s not how I feel.”

In America’s messy plan to atone for its climate errors, carbon capture and storage might stand for more than just the rote processes of filtering a greenhouse gas off combustion sites and injecting it into underground rock. For one, there’s something surreal in the notion that humanity could take this threat to life as we know it and bury it. Forget about it. Like dimming the sun or colonizing Mars, large-scale carbon storage suggests a kind of no-consequences, sci-fi fix to our climate crisis. It makes room for the possibility of change without having to cede the reality of the forces behind it. Change without actually changing.

As we did laps back and forth across Erickson’s field, the teeth of his tractor slashed down the wildflowers and bromegrasses in our path. A canola field nearby shone like neon in the afternoon light. No more neighbors approached the fence line when we came over the rise. Erickson told me it’s not for him to say whether accumulating carbon dioxide in the atmosphere really is causing problems.

“We need CO2 to exist. Plants need it,” he said, almost offhand. “But they’re saying there’s too much.”

This article was researched with support from New York University’s Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award.