ASSOCIATED PRESS: A pipeline company filed hundreds of lawsuits against landowners. Now its project is threatened

via Associated Press

By ERIC FERKENHOFF/LEE ENTERPRISES and JOSH KELETY/AP
April 9, 2025

“Jared Bossly was planting soybeans one spring night in 2023 on his 2,000-acre farm in South Dakota when he spotted a sheriff’s vehicle parked at the corner of his property. He had a hunch it wasn’t a social visit.

“I’m like, ‘Well, I doubt he’s just being a friendly neighbor, giving a guy a beer at eight o’clock at night,’” said Bossly, 43.

He was right. The sheriff’s deputy served him court papers. Summit Carbon Solutions, the company behind a massive proposed carbon pipeline, was suing Bossly to use his land for the project through eminent domain, which is the taking of private property with compensation to the owner.

“He gives me a stack of papers about like this,” Bossly said, stretching his hands several inches. “They started the process of suing us to take our land.”

Bossly is one of many landowners who were sued by Summit Carbon Solutions as it unleashed a barrage of eminent domain legal actions in South Dakota to obtain land for the nearly $9 billion pipeline spanning five Midwest states.

Lee Enterprises and The Associated Press reviewed hundreds of cases, revealing the great lengths the pipeline operator went to get the project built, only to be stymied in South Dakota by a groundswell of opposition from local farmers and landowners. The legal salvo generated so much outrage that South Dakota’s governor signed a bill into law in early March that bans the use of eminent domain for building carbon dioxide pipelines, putting the future of the project in doubt.

The review found that Summit brought 232 lawsuits against landowners across South Dakota, North Dakota and Iowa – including lawsuits seeking access to property for surveys. All 156 of the eminent domain actions were brought in South Dakota. Over the course of two days in late April 2023, the company filed 83 eminent domain lawsuits across the state.”

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“They did this all to themselves,” Brian Jorde, an attorney representing landowners, said of Summit. “Their legal plan was, ‘We will force them into submission because the lawsuits will break them.’”