By O. Kay Henderson (Radio Iowa)

A study commissioned by the renewable fuels industry suggests corn prices in Iowa would drop significantly if carbon capture pipelines are not built in Iowa.

“It’s like asking a farmer, a corn farmer on the corn side of their equation to take an 85% pay cut,” Shaw said during an online news conference this morning.

New federal tax credits are available for proposed pipelines that would capture carbon from Midwest ethanol plants and ship the carbon to underground storage in North Dakota and Illinois. “We are now looking at Iowa being the only…state on the map where there is still an active effort to derail these projects,” Shaw said.

A bill in the Iowa House would establish new steps pipeline developers would have to clear. Most notable is a requirement that property owners along 90% of a pipeline’s route voluntarily let developers have access to their land. The study found the price for corn could plummet by as much as 80 cents per bushel if carbon capture pipelines are connected to ethanol plants elsewhere, but not in Iowa. The Iowa Renewable Fuels Association is asking its members to lobby House members to vote against the bill.

Tim Recker, a corn farmer from Arlington, spoke during today’s news conference. He called carbon pipelines the next step for the ethanol industry.

“If we don’t find favor in getting CO2 transported, I’m going to be shipping corn to my neighboring states or I’m going to be putting a lot more corn on the river system — an 80 year old lock and dam system, our rail sytem or trucking it a lot farther than I do today,” he said “and to me, that’s going backwards in our industry, not forward.”

Shaw cited part of the study which found just 6% of Iowa field corn currently leaves the state without having value added either by being used to make ethanol, fed to livestock or converted to industrial use. “If we don’t align ourselves to be profitable under the current policy and market conditions and we let the ethanol production migrate out to those areas that do, the study found…44% of our corn would leave this state without having any value added to it,” Shaw said.

Key Republican lawmakers who have proposed new regulations for the pipelines say they’re defending the rights of landowners who don’t want their land seized through the government’s eminent domain process. Other pipeline opponents question the safety of the pipelines and whether capturing carbon from ethanol plants is among the best ways to reduce greenhouse gases.

By O. Kay Henderson (Radio Iowa)

A lead sponsor of a bill that would set new regulations for proposed carbon pipelines projects says there may be changes in the bill when it’s debated in the House.

The main part of the bill would require that developers get voluntary access to 90 percent of the miles along the pipeline route before state officials could grant them eminent domain authority to seize the rest. “It’s a big issue for my landowners who do not believe that the blunt force of government should be allowed to be used to take their land for what is a private economic project,” Representative Steven Holt, a Republican from Denison, said, “because that’s what we’re talking about here.”

Holt indicated he’s confident the House will vote on the bill before month’s end. “If private property is going to mean anything in the United States of America, eminent domain cannot be based on seizing property for economic development,” Holt said during a weekend appearance on Iowa Press on Iowa PBS.

Bills in the Senate that outlined new rules for carbon pipelines never made it past an earlier deadline. Representative Lindsay James, a Democrat from Dubuque, said the concern is the bill will die in the senate. “In the House, we are rightfully starting a conversation and hopefully we will continue that conversation and hopefully the governor will take that seriously,” said James, who was also a guest on the Iowa Press program this weekend.

Last month, Governor Reynolds said she’s watching to see what happens with the House bill. While saying there could be areas where pipeline regulations could be tweaked, Reynolds told reporters she’d be having conversations with lawmakers about how new regulations could impact the ethanol industry. The pipelines are touted as a way to make ethanol carbon free and therefore expand markets the corn-based fuel.

By Dar Danielson (Radio Iowa)

The State Patrol says there’s been an increase in distracted driving on the open roadways — and the DOT says it’s become an issue at train crossings as well. Kris Klop oversees the installation of warning devices at rail crossings for the DOT and says accidents started changing around the time of the COVID pandemic.

“For some reason, they’re now running into the side of trains, rather through the gates into the side of the trains, rather than trying to go around the gates and then getting hit by the trains,” he says. “I definitely have a suspicion that involves distracted driving.” Klop says racing to beat a train through a crossing is a conscious decision, but it’s hard to see how someone can just drive through gates into a train.

“Between the train through the middle of the roadway and the flashing lights and the gates, I don’t know how people can miss that and run into the train,” Klop says. Klop says there’s a yearly program to assess rail crossings and the need for warning devices or upgrades — but that doesn’t mean anything if the driver isn’t paying attention.

“Nationwide, 47 percent of the accidents are at crossings that have lights and gates. So putting lights and gates at a railroad crossing does not completely eliminate the chance of there being an accident there,” he says. Klop says the number of accidents at crossings in Iowa has dropped from 300 a year in 1987 down to about 15 a year more recently.

“If everything is working properly and motorists are heeding the warning devices and not paying attention to their phone, they should be safe. If motorists are heading what’s there to warn them of the railroad crossing, they should heed that, and if everything is working properly, then they will be safe,” Klop says. Klop says Iowa has just under five-thousand railroad crossings with 2,264 that are passive and have no signals. There are 1,128 crossings with gates, 702 with just flashing lights, and 742 where the railroad track goes over or under a bridge. He says any crossing where a car has to drive over the track has some sort of advanced warning for drivers.

“At a bare minimum, it’s federally required that they have a crossbuck sign on either side with a yield sign attached to it. Or in some cases, if an engineering study determined it was necessary, they can put a stop sign there in lieu of the yield sign,” Klop says. Of course, you can have a higher level of safety devices, you have flashing lights and gates or cantilevers over the roadway, with flashing lights on them. Klop says they have 15 to 18 rail signal projects during a typical year, and one to three cases each year where they close a crossing.