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Rain showers this morning with some sunshine during the afternoon hours. High 83F. Winds SW at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 100%..
Some clouds. Low 62F. Winds N at 10 to 15 mph.
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Fairbank City Council members on Monday at their regular meeting expressed skepticism about a proposed carbon dioxide-capture pipeline that would cross through the southeast corner of Fayette County and collect carbon dioxide captured at the local POET ethanol plant.
Mayor Pro-Tempore Ron Woods and Councilwoman Tamara Erickson reported back to the council after attending a Fayette County Board of Supervisors meeting on Aug. 1 about the Navigator Heartland Greenway project, which would pass near Fairbank.
Woods said the city attorney advised the council could pass a resolution opposing the pipeline. Woods offered to work on the resolution with the city clerk.
Three out of five council members who spoke up expressed skepticism toward the pipeline’s benefit to Fairbank in the long run.
“Our concern was, if we could get the eminent domain not to happen, that would be the ideal thing,” Woods said.
At the supervisors meeting, Erickson reported hearing from Devyn Hall of the Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement.
“She’s helping other counties oppose this, just put up roadblocks for them,” Erickson said. “The county supervisors can’t actually stop it, but they can write a letter that they don’t want it, and as a city we can write a letter that we don’t want it, and that kind of just throws up roadblocks to the company that’s trying to put it in.”
Woods expected the supervisors would at some point pass an ordinance specific to this pipeline.
“Hopefully the supervisors would pass an ordinance for this certain pipeline. We have a petition that went up there for that,” he said. “Because right now the only ordinance they have is for natural gas which is quite old. Sounds to me like this is quite a different animal coming through.”
Erickson urged citizens to attend the meeting the pipeline company, Navigator Heartland Greenway LLC, is hosting at noon on Tuesday, Aug. 23, at the Oelwein Coliseum, at the corner of First Avenue and First Street Southwest.
“That’s when people need to go and ask the hard questions,” Erickson said.
Erickson expressed concern an ambulance wouldn’t have enough time to respond in an emergency related to the pipeline.
“As a safety standpoint, there’s no — in rural Iowa — any ambulance or that kind of service that could ever handle anything like that, and you have not a lot of time,” she said.
Jason Kayser, the Fairbank Fire Department president, chimed in.
“It would look like a fire extinguisher going off. It’s not flammable, obviously,” Kayser said. “It displaces oxygen, which makes it a really good fire suppressant, but you can’t breathe, you can’t smell it.”
Woods was concerned about the high pressure.
He said it would be much higher pressure than a natural gas line.
“I mean, there’s going to be an explosion if it ruptures,” Woods said.
“There’s very little time, and the only thing you can do is evacuate the town,” Erickson said.
“It’s probably more of a safety issue than anything else,” Woods said.
“That meeting should be interesting because there’s industrial uses for it,” Kayser said. “Why does it have to be piped all the way to South Dakota?”
Erickson said: “One of the things they use it for was to recover oil from the ground, basically a fracking. They’re just not advertising it anymore because there was a lot of opposition. That was one of their selling points but now they’re not advertising it.”
“It was supposed to be green,” someone in the audience said.
“Just to be clear, is there any benefit?” Councilman Matt Coffin asked.
“The recapturing the CO2, they say that’s better for the environment,” Woods said. “There will be some property tax, I guess on the line itself, but nobody really knows what that is at this point. And of course they’re talking jobs. But most of the jobs would be brought in from out of state. A lot of steel.”
An audience member wondered if landowners would get a payment.
“They’re threatening to use eminent domain,” Erickson said.
Erickson questioned the future of the POET ethanol plant.
“Down the road, how long do we know an ethanol plant’s going to be?” Erickson asked.
“It sounds like a bunch of carbon credits they’ll get. They try and trade them,” Woods said.
Councilman Andrew Williams chimed in.
“A gentleman from this company emailed us all and said the ethanol plant gets to keep the tax credits,” Williams said. “But POET’s a big company, that’s not going to stay here, they’re going to use that for everything else.”
Rain showers this morning with some sunshine during the afternoon hours. High 83F. Winds SW at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 100%.
Some clouds. Low 62F. Winds N at 10 to 15 mph.
Partly to mostly cloudy. High near 75F. Winds NNE at 10 to 15 mph.
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