The South Dakota Supreme Court has overturned a lower court ruling that had allowed Summit Carbon Solutions to “survey” and seize landowner’s property for a controversial carbon transport pipeline without their permission via powers of “eminent domain.”

The ruling effectively makes eminent domain use illegal for projects not considered critical infrastructure.In the 42-page decision, South Dakota’s highest court ruled that Summit Carbon Solutions is NOT a “common carrier” and is therefore not privy to powers of eminent domain and adverse possession commonly used to seize private land for construction of right-of-way for industrial enterprises that can be shown to “serve the common good.”

Such a denial of sweeping eminent domain powers for green energy producers is a massive victory for South Dakota landowners and could foreshadow a U.S. Supreme Court showdown over the future of the Green ‘New Deal’ Agenda in America that many see as a political boondoggle for the enriching friends and associates of the political elite while wasting massive amounts of taxpayer money on empirically inferior and inefficient power generation methods like wind and solar farms that are a blight and eyesore on midwestern farmland.

The ruling could be the death knell to Summit’s ongoing effort to acquire the land necessary to build a carbon capture and sequestration pipeline that would transport CO2 byproduct of large ethanol producers to underground holding areas in North Dakota.

The CO2 pipeline project became the touchstone issue in the 2024 GOP primary elections in South Dakota, motivating an energetic backlash against more than a dozen incumbent GOP state legislators who had shown support for the Summit project, only to lose their primary bids for reelection to grassroots campaigns.

The issue also proved an illuminating moment regarding the true political identity of Governor Kristi Noem, viewed as a red state “Freedom” Governor by new arrivals and COVID “refugees” who relocated from blue state lockdowns, only to find Noem deeply compromised by far leftist “environmental” and climate justice groups and ethanol companies pushing the CO2 project at the expense of private property rights.Governor Noem offered no support for multiple legislative bills that would have reinforced landowners’ rights and placed outright moratorium of eminent domain use by private corporations on South Dakota land. Critics allege Noem went further behind the scenes, privately engineering legislative defeat of those measures before commenting only vaguely and conveniently that “…those bills never reached my desk.”

Further revelation came when it was learned Summit Carbon Industries had been prime sponsor of Noem’s 2023 inaugural ball in Pierre.

The $8 billion Summit proposal would collect carbon dioxide emissions from 57 Midwestern ethanol plants and transport it across South Dakota, Kansas, Minnesota, North Dakota and Iowa via high pressure pipeline to North Dakota for underground storage.

The South Dakota decision is seen as a landmark ruling by a state supreme court denying broader classification of “green” energy projects like wind and solar farms as common “utilities” similar to electrical power plants, railroads, and high voltage transmission lines, classification long coveted by “renewable energy” advocates to empower a disastrous nationwide transition to weak, unreliable, intermittent and insufficient wind and solar projects that would render the American energy grid unusable and impractical, even as electricity demand rises rapidly to accommodate electric vehicle mandates and the continued international arms race of cryptocurrency mining amid a deepening fiat currency crisis worldwide.