Nebraska pipeline company wins over ‘Keystone Killer’ with landowner and community benefits plan

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You could choose a few spots as the place where the Keystone XL pipeline met its end.

Perhaps it was at the strategy sessions where environmental groups marshalled their resources against the project, intended to deliver Canadian crude to the U.S. Gulf Coast. Or maybe it was inside the White House, where President Joe Biden ordered the cancellation of its permit on his first day in office.

But one other place arguably played an outsized role in its demise: the state of Nebraska, where a group of advocates and landowners spent years fighting the pipeline and creating barriers to its construction. Rural activist Jane Kleeb rallied ranchers, landowners, tribal groups and others in a loud and effective opposition. Rolling Stone christened her “Keystone Killer.”

Over more than a decade, what began in Nebraska has spread. The group Ms. Kleeb founded, BOLD Alliance, now works in nine states and operates a Pipeline Fighters Hub to help people across the U.S. battle new projects.

Now, however, Ms. Kleeb has found a pipeline she supports. Earlier this year, BOLD agreed to a community benefits package with Tallgrass, a Leawood, Kan.-based pipeline company building a transmission system designed to carry captured carbon dioxide emissions across Nebraska so they can be sequestered underground rather than emitted into the atmosphere.

Under the agreement, Tallgrass committed to paying 10 years of royalties to individual landowners – an unusual direct benefit that grows as volumes increase – in addition to royalties for a community foundation and cash to local communities. Another US$500,000 will go to non-profits in affected counties, in addition to US$600,000 to train and equip first responders.

Tallgrass also committed to returning easements to landowners at the end of the project’s life, with the option to either remove the pipe or abandon it in place. Much of the project will use existing natural gas pipe.

Still, the pipeline fighters say the agreement, and its model of greater revenue for landowners, should form a template for an industry whose work they have sought to frustrate. The sequestration of carbon dioxide is an element of U.S. action on climate change, but it has been opposed by green groups as bad policy – much of the carbon would come from ethanol plants that transform corn from a food into fuel – and potentially dangerous, given the potential for a carbon dioxide leak to choke those nearby.

BOLD’s support for Tallgrass is rooted less in the content it carries than the way it has dealt with landholders.

“We do see this as a model for big energy projects, whether it’s a fossil fuel project or a clean energy project,” Ms. Kleeb said.

Kyle Quackenbush, a senior executive with Tallgrass, called it an unprecedented agreement that was the result of a corporate willingness to work alongside local groups. Although Tallgrass did not renounce forcible land expropriation through eminent domain the company believes it can complete its project “without needing to use that as an incentive,” Mr. Quackenbush said.

That has not made the agreement less controversial in the industry, with critics telling Tallgrass it has set a damaging standard.

“Some folks feel like some of the precedents that were set in the agreement will make pipeline projects more expensive,” Mr. Quackenbush said.

The agreement is unlikely to be perfectly replicable by other projects, he said. But he is hopeful that it will prod more thinking about how companies can provide community benefits from pipeline construction. (TC Energy declined comment.)

Beyond financial numbers, the agreement stipulates how the company will interact with landowners, such as setting a defined length of time for negotiations and periods of prior notice for survey work. Tallgrass argues that it may, in the end, be cheaper to offer more generous benefits than to fight in court.

“Projects that are wrapped up for years in litigation – it is an expensive endeavour for those projects,” Mr. Quackenbush said.

Carbon pipelines have been spurred by generous tax credits that are part of the Joe Biden administration’s efforts to combat climate change. In Nebraska and elsewhere, they will deliver carbon captured from ethanol plants for sequestration.

But they have attracted some of the fierce opposition once directed toward oil infrastructure.

Last year, Dallas-headquartered Navigator CO2 Ventures cancelled a planned 2,092-kilometre Heartland Greenway pipeline, citing the “unpredictable nature of the regulatory and government processes.” Ms. Kleeb celebrated in a press release: “Navigator found out what happens when you go against organized landowners and unlikely alliances.”

Regulators in South Dakota also denied a permit to Summit Carbon Solutions. The company, which is working to build a 4,000-kilometre system, plans to reapply, but legislators in the state passed three bills this March intended to increase protections for landowners.

Critics of carbon pipelines cite the risk of an asphyxiating leak, pointing to a 2020 rupture in Mississippi that crippled vehicles and hospitalized 45. A local emergency director described to NPR a “zombie apocalypse” scene of people laying on the ground struggling for breath.

Nebraskans share similar concerns.

“Some of the information I’ve got said, if you had a major leak, it could annihilate a great portion of the county,” said Merle Noel, a farmer who has been on the board of supervisors for Nebraska’s Fillmore County since 2011.

Landowners told The Globe and Mail they have not yet received any details about a potential agreement with the company, or what it could mean for them financially.

It’s too soon to say whether the BOLD deal will win favour, Mr. Noel said.

“I have seen nothing in writing that guarantees the payment of anything,” he said. “If you’re going to write me a cheque and it ain’t signed, what’s it worth?”

For some, he said, the involvement of Ms. Kleeb’s group may raise suspicions, rather than lowering them. Ms. Kleeb chairs the Nebraska Democratic Party; many rural Nebraskans are committed Republicans.

“I have some deep-seated questions about BOLD Nebraska,” Mr. Noel said. “I don’t trust them at all.”

Tallgrass will still need to work out individual agreements with each landowner, as any pipeline would.

But the agreement provides a starting point that should create more productive conversations, said Shelli Meyer, a landowner organizer with BOLD. Her family homestead has been approached by two other carbon pipelines; both mentioned the possible use of eminent domain in their initial letters.

“When you put those two words in a letter to a farmer that’s farmed his entire life on the same ground – you just don’t do that. That’s bullying and that’s just nasty,” she said. “But that’s how these companies work.”

Her hope for the Tallgrass agreement is “that it indicates that there can be a compromise. There’s good people on both sides. You just have to find them.”