The largest gold rush in U. S. historyThe U. S. is about to hit rural America and will not involve corn, cattle, or even gold. Instead, the big thing will be in the pipelines.

That’s right, pipes; pressurized carbon dioxide pipelines designed to send CO2 from ethanol plants in the Midwest to “sequestration” in North Dakota or Illinois.

Impatient investors are already lining up to exploit those climate-altering veins of CO2. South Dakota and Minnesota, to kidnapping sites.

Everything will be expensive. A pipeline proposal, called Navigator CO2 Ventures, will charge about $2 billion to bury 1,300 miles of pipeline to ship 15 million CO2 per year from the Midwest to North Dakota.

More: Navigator CO2 Venture’s Heartland Greenway Pipeline Finds Skepticism in Des Moines County

Another, announced Jan. 11 via Archer Daniels Midland, will travel 350 miles to join ADM’s ethanol plants in Iowa and Illinois and end up in Decatur, Illinois, where it will supply 12 million tons of CO2 per year to buy about 8,000 feet underground.

The third, and the most debatable, is planned by Summit Carbon Solutions, an Iowa company with close ties to former Gov. Terry Branstad, the recent U. S. ambassador. Tom Vilsack, also a former governor and current U. S. Secretary of Agriculture. USA

(In mid-December, Branstad wrote a scathing letter, on Summit letterhead, attacking critics of the pipeline saying they were “not friends of Iowa or its farmers. “father’s influence on White House climate replacement policies. )

Each manufacturer claims that their pipeline will create “permanent” jobs, but as if to show how fluid the underlying mathematics are for any “carbon capture and sequestration” program, those numbers range from 50 to 460.

An even bigger question is what pipeline developers will do with their carbon once it’s transported to their sequester site. All of them, like Summit, say that CO2 will be “permanently and safely stored underground in deep geological garage rooms. “

That’s not the case, pipeline warring parties like the Sierra Club of Iowa, which claim that much of the pipeline’s CO2 will be “used to improve oil recovery,” a “process of pumping CO2 into declining oil fields to extract the last portion of oil. “from the ground. ” Proof of this is that two of the pipelines through Iowa end up in North Dakota, a major manufacturer of “fracture” oil, explains the environmental nonprofit.

If that’s true, any carbon sequestration claim, calculated as the equivalent of “retiring 2. 6 million cars a year” or sequestering “three times Des Moines’ carbon footprint consistent with the year,” is, like CO2 itself, just a lot of gas.

Most importantly, genuine CO2 cash comes thanks to the federal government’s “Section 45Q Carbon Sequestration Tax Credit. “Currently, this credit is $31. 77 per ton for “geologically sequestered CO2” and $20. 22 per ton if used for oil recovery. .

That means the expected tax, which will likely be resold in carbon secondary markets, would be worth at least $400 million a year for one of Iowa’s 3 pipeline projects if used to buy CO2 permanently and a third less if used in oil recovery.

In 2026, however, this federal credit increases to $50 per ton of stored CO2 and $35 per ton of CO2 from oil recovery, doubling companies’ annual intake. Over the next 20 years, those benefits, even if they don’t grow, will cost billions for any pipeline builder.

And this huge cost, basically borne through taxpayers and harvested basically through well-connected people, absolutely trumps any debate about non-CO2 production in the first place, through the most productive and most effective CO2 mitigation program.

As such, this new gold rush, like most, will end with a very small number taking away all the wealth and everyone else will pay for it.