PIERRE, S.D – On Tuesday, Summit Carbon Solutions got a second chance to convince South Dakota’s Public Utilities Commission that there is a way to make their current application possible.
However, it was the landowners in attendance at Tuesday’s meeting with a literal sigh of relief as the Public Utilites Commission denied Summit’s application to build a carbon pipeline in the state of South Dakota.
Citing physical, mental and financial pain, landowners showed appreciation to the Commission for not letting the permit application drag on indefinitely.
“It puts a lot of us at ease right now because of what happened here today, but we’ll still be on watching, we’ll be on guard because we don’t know what this company will do down the road,” Ed Fischbach, a Spink County landowner and longtime opponent of the pipeline said.
Prior to the decision, Summit’s attorney Brett Koenecke insisted that Summit was the party truly experiencing prejudice in the situation and that an indefinite pause to scheduling would’ve caused no issues.
“It’s not about fairness it’s about the law, but it’s a little difficult for a multi-billion-dollar corporation that hasn’t been so kind to landowners to say they were somehow prejudiced, so I thought that was a little bit rich,” Brian Jorde, an attorney for intervening landowners said.
With Summit in need of all five states to approve the pipeline, landowners are expecting the company to look for other possibilities to make that happen.
Koenecke told the Commission that Summit would not turn House Bill 1052 into a Referred Law and therefore Summit with have to go a different direction with options of litigation or another application still possible
Dakota News Now
