05/15/2026
LISTEN NOW: Drilled has produced a multi-episode podcast about Iowa's Bruce Rastetter's (Summit Ag / Summit Carbon) CO2 pipeline schemes and misadventures with corn ethanol and "carbon capture" in Brazil.
Partial transcript of Episode 1, available now:
"In early September 2025, a handful of Brazilian government officials headed to North Dakota on a mission. It was a technical mission. They were there to see a shiny new green technology in action. The idea behind this new technology was simple. When you turn corn into ethanol, it generates carbon dioxide, and that's a problem if you're trying to be a green fuel. But now, people from Iowa to North Dakota were capturing that carbon dioxide, storing it, and selling it. Never mind that they were selling it to people who would inject it underground to get more oil out. Some of it would surely still stay underground, and if you tilted your head and squinted a bit, that made it a climate solution.
The American company selling the Brazilians on this idea had a lot riding on these officials believing that carbon capture connected to ethanol was a great green success story, win-win for industry and the environment, an American dream they could take home to Brazil. But had the visiting bureaucrats scanned the local newspapers, they might have found a different story.
Facebook ad: If you live in Iowa, your land, your water, and your voice could all be at risk thanks to a man named Bruce Rastetter.
Carolyn Raffensperger: you know, essentially paying him to capture CO2 at ethanol plants, and then shipping it across private land and public land, and then disposing of it somewhere many states away.
Amy: On September second, the Brazilian contingent met with an Iowa company called Summit Carbon Solutions. Summit has been trying for years to build a carbon capture pipeline to connect dozens of ethanol plants from Iowa to North Dakota. It's called the Midwest Carbon Express Project.
Harold Hamm, who controls many of North Dakota's oil fields and is an energy advisor to President Trump, is a major investor in the company. Bruce Rastetter is the company's co-founder. He's also founder and executive chairman of its parent company, Summit Agricultural Group. For all their cheerleading of the project to visitors, the Summit Pipeline is years behind schedule and facing multiple political and legal roadblocks.
In fact, it's managed to do what almost no politician, issue, or campaign has been able to do in the US for years, united far left and far right populous. People from both sides hate this pipeline. For Rastetter, it's not the first time he's faced opposition, especially in his home state of Iowa. Anyone who remotely follows politics or agriculture, you say Rastetter, you're gonna get a response. Jess Mazour is the conservation coordinator for the Sierra Club Iowa. For Jess, the carbon pipeline was not the first time she'd dealt with Bruce Rastetter. They know who it is and they go, "Oh, you know, that guy did this," or, "That guy put a factory farm near my house," or, "He's the one that, you know, got Iowa State in trouble." So I think everyone's got an opinion of him, and he's really, really good at being able to avoid ever having to be in the public. He doesn't get interviewed. He doesn't take media requests. Um, kind of secretive. He lives out in the middle of nowhere in Hardin County, Iowa. Rastetter got his start as a big hog farmer.
From there, it wasn't a big leap to growing corn and then, like a lot of corn growers, that led quickly to getting into the corn ethanol business. As a longtime climate reporter, I keep waiting for people to stop calling corn ethanol green. Its carbon footprint is similar to regular old gas. It requires around 30 times as much land as solar, plus lots of water and chemical pesticides and fertilizers.
But industrial agriculture gets loads of subsidies from it, so they're always finding a way to keep it alive. And in 2022, Congress handed it its latest lifeline. The Inflation Reduction Act contains some really incredible things for our shareholders. It contains sustainable aviation fuel. We think that's an incredible part of decarbonizing the planet.
The Inflation Reduction Act, Biden's big climate policy, created a whole new revenue stream for the corn ethanol guys. Now they could sell to airlines, but only if they embraced carbon capture. Bruce Rastetter to the rescue. So I think without continuing to attain new markets, uh, the ethanol industry is in jeopardy.
So that's what lowering carbon scores, this project on the pipeline is, is about with 34 ethanol plants across the upper Midwest, but in particular Iowa Summit Carbon Solutions still talks about the project today as a way to open up new markets for Iowa corn farmers. So the company was caught off guard when people across multiple states began organizing against the Midwest Carbon Express, and it quickly became a big problem because Rastetter was not just the ethanol kingpin of Iowa. His company was also the majority owner of a Brazilian ag company, FS Fueling Sustainability, and he'd helped to make corn ethanol a thing in Brazil, too. Now Summit is trying to make carbon capture happen there, too. Welcome to Drilled season 15: Carbon Cowboys. I'm Amy Westervelt, and this season we've partnered with the amazing reporters at The Intercept Brazil to learn more about what Rastetter is doing down there."
Investigating the obstacles to action on climate change.
