Feature
North Dakota Wants Your Carbon, But Not Your Climate Science
A $9 billion plan to entomb CO2 emissions has a distinctly non-environmental attraction for the people of the Great Plains: It could allow the region to keep pumping oil and burning coal.
An abandoned house in the proposed carbon storage area for Summit Carbon Solutions south of Beulah, North Dakota.
Photographer: Lewis Ableidinger for Bloomberg Businessweek
Jason Erickson is a landman on the ranches and farms of western North Dakota. Traditionally, the title refers to someone who brokers the deals wildcatters need to drill for oil on private land. But Erickson belongs to a new breed in that old line. What he does is different, an inverse. He seals land deals so that atmosphere-warming carbon dioxide—hundreds of millions of tons of it—can be pumped deep underneath.