How Government Established the Carbon Capture Cartel

North Dakota has been quietly assembling a carbon capture cartel — “one statute, one loophole, one quiet decision at a time” — over the past two decades.

“Chuck Carbondale” makes this claim on the ESG University Substack. He says that under the guiding hand of North Dakota Director of Mineral Resources Lynn Helms, the state has been rewriting its pore-space laws since 2009. These impact how empty geologic formations (i.e., “pore space”) beneath private land are used.

Helms’ Deceptive Practices

Carbondale says these “statutory shifts” made no headlines as they quietly transferred control of this subsurface property to the state. “The state created the ability to bundle private property owners into large storage units — without their consent,” he writes, thereby setting the stage heavily against surface landowners and in favor of today’s contentious carbon capture projects.

According to Carbondale, Helms has a history of deceptive practices. Data from his office have wildly contradicted conservative claims he’s made about water usage for fracking (to the tune of millions of gallons per well), at the same time that the state was “rearrang[ing] water rights in favor of industry.” Helms himself has disparaged public input about statutory changes, stating in 2014, “I just don’t see much value in public comment.” Policies were thereafter amended so that his office is not obligated to heed public remarks.

Besides redefining pore space, Helms’ office also blurred the lines for eminent domain by designating subsurface areas for the “public good.”

Then in 2019, the state Legislature passed a bill “to force private pore space into a carbon storage unit without landowner consent.”

Summit Carbon Solutions

Within four years, landowners began hearing from Summit Carbon Solutions, a for-profit company that sprouted in 2022 and began planning a carbon capture pipeline through private land in five Midwestern states. And despite the fact that it had no previous experience capturing or transporting carbon dioxide, the company bragged that its first-ever pipeline would be operational by 2024.

With billions of dollars in federal subsidies available and state regulators and legislators tipping the scales, “Summit didn’t have to fight their way to the front of the line,” Carbondale quips. “The line had been cleared for them.”

Though Summit has already missed its 2024 target date, with not one foot of pipeline placed in 2025, the company is still moving forward. “A miss like that would bury any true free-market operator,” he points out. “But a government-built cartel? … That machine can miss every deadline, every projection, every engineering benchmark — and still march forward untouched.”

Same Deception in Other States

The same kinds of tactics have been deployed in other states. For example, South Dakota legislators passed a law allowing companies with active applications before the Public Utilities Commission to survey private land without owners’ permission. Iowa enacted a similar law.

“If you’re just a farmer in South Dakota and there’s a little tweak in the survey law that makes it easier, it waters down protections, but you probably don’t even know it’s happening,” says Brian Jorde of Domina Law Group, a firm representing many of the landowners fighting for their property rights. “They’ve got all the money, they’ve got all the lobbyists, and they are putting this in place systematically underneath our feet when we don’t even know what’s happening.”

Jorde warns that the slow, deliberate process has set up the system against private landowners. His advice is that “staying engaged in the political process, although completely frustrating, is critical.”

Carbon capture pipelines are part and parcel of Agenda 2030 and the globalists’ war on farmers. See The John Birch Society’s action project to stop the pipelines and the war on farmers and food.