Kim Monson Show
Logan County family says 1981 easement bars CO2 in Tallgrass Pipeline
Trent Loos closed the episode on a family in Logan County, Colorado. Carbon dioxide has been running for four months through the Trailblazer pipeline out of Nebraska, a line built in 1983 on easements gathered starting in 1981 to move natural gas from Wyoming to Beatrice, Nebraska, and since converted to send carbon dioxide back to Carpenter, Wyoming for injection a mile and a half underground. The Hume family, who live along that line, have been experiencing uncharacteristic symptoms. The pipeline runs 800 feet from their front door and a compressor station sits 951 feet away, and they found that their original 1981 easement does not permit carbon dioxide, which Loos has been chasing for three years on the theory that Tallgrass Energy would have needed permission to change the product. He warned that carbon dioxide in old steel forms carbonic acid wherever moisture is present, which corrodes the line toward rupture, and he noted that it is what processing plants use in chambers to kill pigs, chickens, and turkeys, and that it is about 1.5 times heavier than air.
Kim Monson pressed him on whether that hands ammunition to the people who have spent years vilifying carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, and he answered with the concentrations. It sits in the atmosphere at 0.043 percent, or 430 parts per million, where it is plant food. A greenhouse runs 800 parts per million, and Loos said a commercial greenhouse operator he knows in Canada runs 1,200. At 5 percent people begin to suffer for it, and at 7 percent a pig is dead in a minute. The human body is 17 percent carbon, and the gas is essential to plant and human life. Loos compared it to water, which he called the world’s number one chemical killer, and said what keeps you safe is how you manage it.
“I think it’s the biggest land grab in the history of this country. It has nothing to do with AI.”
Trent Loos, Sixth-Generation Rancher
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE HERE, starts at 1:43:25
