The Carbon Gold Rush

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They were there to see a shiny new green technology in action. But 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”

oil out, some of it would surely still stay underground and if you tilted your head and squint it a bit, that made it a climate solution. The American company selling the Brazilians on this idea had a lot of writing on these officials believing that carbon capture connected to ethanol was a great green success story. Winland for industry in the environment, an American dream they could take home to Brazil.

It had the visiting bureaucrats, scan the local newspapers, they might have found eight different story. If you live in Iowa, you're land, your water, and your voice could all be at risk thanks to a man named Bruce Rastetter. Uh, 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. On September 2nd, 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 Ham, 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 a founder and executive chairman of its parent company, Summit Agricultural

Group. For all their cheerleading of the project of visitors, the Summit Pipeline is years behind schedule and facing multiple political and legal roadblocks. In fact, it's managed to do almost no politician issue or campaign has been able to do in the U.S. for years, united far-left and far-right populace.

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 followed politics or agriculture, you say Rastetter, you're going to get a response. Rast Miser is the conservation coordinator for the Sierra Club, Iowa. For just 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, back I did this, so that guy put a factory farm near my house." So, 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. He's kind of steered if 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 after all business. As a longtime climber reporter, I keep waiting for people to stop calling corn ethanol, green. It's carbon footprint is similar to regular 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 way to keep it alive.

And in 2022, Congress handed it its latest lifeline.

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, the ethanol industry is in jeopardy.

“So, that's why lowering carbon scores this project on the pipeline is about with 34 ethanol”

planets across the upper Midwest, but in particular Iowa. Climate 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, F.S. Newling 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 Westerval, and this season we've partnered with the amazing reporters at the Intercept”

Brazil to learn more about what Rastetter is doing down there. I'm Philippe Sabirina with the Interceptor Brazil. I will be hosting the Portuguese version of the season over on the Interceptor Brazil feed. This is a story about how the ethanol kingpin of Iowa became the king of corn in Brazil.

And how a bunch of ideas that are great for the oil and ag industries got rebranded as climate solutions and created a carbon gold rush. A few months ago, Philippe started telling me about this giant pig statue that greets people near Bruce Rastetter's home base in Brazil. Because yes, his partners in Brazil also started out as pig farmers.

These guys are all still in the pig business and boy do they love pigs.

“When Philippe sent me a picture of this pig statue, I was kind of shook.”

If you're imagining some sort of tasteful bronze statue, think again, this is a massive working pig looking thing wearing later hose in and a bright green hat, holding a corn cob. And it even has a name, looking at, or little Lucas. Because the town is called Lucas de Huverge, it tells you actually a lot about this place.

It was proposed by one of the largest landowners in the area, big agriculture business guy. He comes from a German family which is why the pig is wearing a German outfit. On 50 years ago, the Brazilian agriculture industry came to this place looking for a cheap and easy land grab.

Today, the American agriculture industry is doing the same thing. The cities of the city. The video mixes images of macaws, forests in the sunset and large cotton soybean and corn fields. The city government wants you to know that Lucas is the city of opportunities.

It has more than 95,000 inhabitants and produces more than 2 million tons of green per

year. The narrator of the video says, "We are one of the fastest growing cities in Brazil, and then the screen fills with a mix of smiling children, crops and green pouring out of machines." Lucas de Huverge is our money, growth and seize of corn and soybeans as far as the

I can see. The first time I visited, it shocked me to see massive crops right next to people's homes. But the more I learned about Lucas, the more it made sense. The town is a fiction designed and built by the government to impose development on this region.

Lucas was entirely created to serve agriculture and its owners. The wide avenues are lined with silos, agriculture, machinery stores, supply stores, credit banks, and real estate agencies. Tracks over 20 meters long loaded with soybeans are corn, have plenty of space to drive around or park on the curb.

long avenues, the heat, and the lack of trees to provide shade.

“The city is obsessed with imperial palm trees.”

There are hundreds of them in the town center and on the sides of the roads. With nothing but monoculture crops and imported palm trees, there is no vegetation in the area to insulate it from extreme temperature changes. Lucas can go from freezing cold to unbelievably hot from one moment to the next. It was weird for me, but the people I spoke with here didn't sink to mind.

The image of abundant harvests has drawn people from all over the country to Lucas. My husband was an employed for two years, then we saw reports on the city, which is a very

good place to leave to raise children, even in terms of violence.

So we back to our backs. Isabella is from Minister Ice, a Brazilian state's southeast of Lucas.

“But since 2021, she's been living here with her husband and children.”

She sells Asaiables in front of the parking lot of a multinational green company. Asai is a fruit typical of the Amazon. Isabella buys it from suppliers and sells it to truck drivers who load and unload grain here. She passes small bowls of Asai cream through the fence and the truckers pass back cash.

Isabella said Lucas is great, not least because when she needs to take her kids to a public

hospital, she never waits more than an hour to be seen.

In the city, I don't think anyone can complain about health care. She says the Lucas the Rio Verge Hospital's Salucas in particular is especially nice. It's run today by a partnership between the city and agribusiness entrepreneurs. Now this open a really nice word that the whole hostel has been renovated. A part of the doação de cinco milhões reais, the hospital is a Lucas contrarac with a new

aisle, a center of maternity fatigue, the space will proporcionar a sustenance integral for humans and recignacidos. In fact, the new maternity word at the Salucas Hospital has a promotional video too. And if you took it into it, listeners might recognize a not so Brazilian sounding name. Bruce Resseter, the ethanol kingpin of Iowa.

He wields a lot of power there, but outside the state he's not exactly a household name. Now suddenly a new wing in the hospital in this Brazilian farm town was being named Doctor of this guy, how did that happen? The hospital canceled my tour just before I arrived. So our producer Massa Hever does and I just showed up to see what we could see.

We talked to a hospital worker in the hallway. It was a little hard to hear there because Philippe and Marcia were trying to tape with their phone and of course she's speaking in Portuguese too. But when they asked her about the name of the ward, the Bruce Resseter wing, she said it was named after Bruce, a doctor from Ohio.

We're still not sure where she got that idea. But funding big public projects, especially around hospitals in healthcare, is really common in Brazil. You just heard how when telling Philippe about what she likes about Lucas is a Bella mentioned healthcare.

People think of hospitals as an example of how nice a city is or how well it's working. So with Lucas has a good hospital, no one can say that the politicians or the businessman running things here are bad. That goes double for anything that's focused on women and children. So a maternity ward checks a lot of boxes.

And then we found out that the hospital is run by a foundation led by one of Resseter's Brazilian business partners, Marino Franz. Marino's brother Paolo is the one that proposed that giant pig statue that looks out over Lucas. And understand how Resseter, the American farmer, ended up with a Brazilian rural maternity

ward named after him, we had to figure out how the Franz brothers fit into it.

“And what brought Bruce to Brazil in the first place?”

That's gonna be it, have to the break.

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decisions. Uncanny Valley tackles the questions keeping you up at night, and helps make sense of the future taking shape right now. Listen to new episodes every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts. Lucas to Rio their days in the Brazilian state of Montagroso, a state that is almost

exactly half agriculture and half Amazon rainforest. It used to be even more Amazon. For decades, the state was considered the frontier in Brazil. The forest were preserved, and it was home to even more indigenous people than it is today. But in the 1960s and 1970s, Brazil's military government deployed a new strategy was called

the National Integration Plan, and the idea was to eliminate indigenous communities that were seen as anti-development, and integrate the North and Midwest to Brazil into the national economy. This propaganda film from the 70s celebrates the quote "revolution" reaching the jungle, toppling trees in favor of revs.

The goal was to develop the Amazon by building infrastructure in the wilderness, displacing indigenous residents, and encouraging people from outside the region to move there. To be pioneers and go to this frontier and tame it. The main farm towns in Montagroso today were deliberate colonization projects, many of them built and funded by the Brazilian government.

The government offered people lots of land, housing, and sometimes even credit to move there. They even funded research to figure out how crops like soybeans and cotton could be grown in the tropical climate there.

“That's what brought the Franz Brothers there decades ago.”

And according to Paolo, it's the Franz Brothers who brought Bruce to the area. In Paolo's telling, it all happened because of an internship he did in Iowa, and an important contact made there. Here is talking about it on a Brazilian podcast. Terry Branstad, the governor of Iowa at the time, and eventually U.S. ambassador to China

during Trump's first presidency.

Paolo says they all went to soccer games together a lot. Paolo says it was Branstad who introduced him to Bruce Rastetter. Bruce is the CEO of the company, the founder. He has a huge passion for pigs and has been involved with pigs his whole life. He was a pig farmer until he started getting into ethanol, which is a very recent thing.

I don't know whether just to clarify, Americans produce more ethanol from corn than we do from sugarcane. There, the philosophy of the culture is producing ethanol from corn. Although it was president, I met with his Terry Branstad who was the governor of Iowa. We met and he wanted to buy some land here in Brazil.

Bruce doesn't mention any of this when he's asked about how he wound up in Brazil. Here's how he talked about it on a farming podcast a couple of years ago. So when we sold Hawkeye to Coke Industries, that was one of his ethanol companies. That freed me up for the first time to do other things outside of being responsible for a larger company and started traveling to Brazil.

This is how Bruce talks about it in other interviews, too. He was interested in Brazil because it's the main agricultural competitor to the U.S. or because other U.S. companies had done well there, et cetera, et cetera. It was when we were trying to verify Bruce and Paolo's differing versions of this story at our Brazil editor, Alise de Sousa, Falunegai, with yet another version.

“This is the profile of our U.S. 300, are you looking at this from a negative standpoint?”

Or you're looking at it from a good perspective, but I don't mind being neutral.

I can be critical of this, too, but I'm because clients might have invested in upwards

So I don't want to fuck this up.

“That's Corey Melby, an agriculture consultant in Brazil.”

I came from Northwest Minnesota, developed in land. So of course, when in the early 2000s, with my progress on all of this saving and expansion

was taking place, I was going to be the land guy for a group from some of the first guys

I went down. But you're going to be here for it, pick up the language, pick up the context. You can be the real estate guy. So that's where I started, was from that perspective. Full disclosure, we paid Corey Melby to be a fixer for us on the ground in Matagroso.

The idea was that he would take us around and ideally arrange a meeting with the brothers friends at their farm. None of that ended up panning out, but he did talk to Felipe and I, and he told us a lot about how Bruce started out in Brazil.

“He also added me to his newsletter list, which is a wealth of acknowledge about Brazil.”

Although it comes out so many times a week, I still have about 500 unread emails in a folder

marked Corey. So I've been on every farm in Matagroso. I wrote the boom times and the bus and the boom times and the bus again was on my friend. So I have, you know, I have that 25 year arch of experience, so I'm the good man on the

way of life across and believe me, there's 20 of all of it. He knows a lot about Bruce and the front brothers because he did for Bruce, what he's done for the past 25 years for other Americans looking to get into the ag business in Matagroso. He toured them around looking for a land. Back in 2011, I was visiting the free bar and he was a young dynamic guy and he was a

Korean, well, we're looking to develop a corn oil meal processing and investors are partnering that on all of it. So I was ready about this BS and my newsletters at the time and also visiting at Lucas the Overday at the Elements at the time, talking to farmers, "Oh, corn hasn't on corn hasn't on corn, we got to get corn as a dollar or going to parry ourselves."

Because of his newsletter and his ties to various American ag folks, Corey has kind of become known as the guy to call, if you're an American who wants to give a sense of Matagroso. So when people started talking about corn as and all there, it was only a matter of time before you got to call from you, you know who. "Someone from Iowa, which I'm sure you are very familiar with Bruce Rastetter and Eric,

and then a little club. I get a little from Bruce's there, email, "Hey, we would like to grow some, we're going to be dollar or another reason, could we do something all of a part?" "Was you worried?" They didn't want to take one of Corey's pre-packaged ag tours.

"So, this is one of the other, we do a little part of our tour, they go home, I figured off just another tour, we're looking at land, we love to get corn out of this land." Corey carried on, thinking nothing of it, but six months or so later, he got a call from some friends in Matagroso. "My dear friend, the sons this, you know, they were going, you know, we want to get an

ethanol, we're not here, but we need to help, we need to hurt, we need to get a little percent of it." "So, I was telling Bruce and they got into the time, you know, I got friends, I'm going to get a ethanol, I forgot guys." According to Corey, at the time, Bruce and the guys weren't quite ready to get into

the ethanol business in Brazil, they were just looking for some farmland. Then they came back for another trip, and as Corey tells it, "This is when they met the frances." Corey helped broker the deal between Bruce and the frances, and it kept them all talking.

“"It's three years, it's all on this damn farm, but that's why we're just then open”

the door with trust and careful of, hey, let's, let's build an ethanol building and look at the other." The frances had hit the big time, they were getting into business with the ethanol kingpan of Iowa. It was a whole new level, whereas Corey calls it, Cycle 3.

" Cycle 1 is deforestation in Cal, Cycle 2 is Sean, Cycle 2.5 is soy corn, basically

you know, in the combination. Cycle 3 now is the, what we would say, industrial for added value

industrial agriculture, he'd have enough some free time on his hands, and now this international

king of corn had picked them. What luck? But that story misses one important detail. At the time he was doing land tours in Brazil, Bruce Rastudder was having a really bad time back home in Iowa. Since 2012, since that big land grab attempt in Africa, he had become a dirty word in Iowa.

“It's just, that's what he does, it's like his business model, you know, and whether it was”

in Iowa with, you know, how he was treating Iowa farmers or now it's globally. Yeah, he

just keeps pushing his business advancement, right? It's all about his corporate profits. Friends of friends have said that he's kind of over Iowa and more interested in Brazil, which when it was a thousand issues, if I had the choice that, you know, being a place where everybody hated me and a place where people found over me, I'd probably go to the global fund over me.

That's our story next time.

“We reached out to Bruce Rastudder, Harold Ham, the Franz Brothers, Miguel Doz Rivera, and all”

summit companies and Brazilian government agencies mentioned in this season for comment and have incorporated any responses we received throughout the season. Carbon Cowboys, Cowboys of the Sahado, is a collaboration between Drilled and the Interceptive Brazil. The show was reported and written by Felipe Sabrina and me, Amy Westervalt. Our editors are all drew queen in the US and Alicia Disosa in Brazil.

Our senior producer and sound designer is Martin Zoltz Ostweck. Audio production and

“sound design in Brazil by Marcia Haver Dozza and Philippe MOOCs.”

Thing song and original music by Eric Terena. Additional music by Martin Zoltz Ostweck. Our engineer is Peter Duff. Artwork for Drilled is by Matt Fleming.

US fact checking from Naomi Bar. Brazil fact checking by Istudio Fronteira. Our first

member in attorney is James Weaton with the first amendment project. We are also proud members of reporter shield. Big thanks also to Andrew Fishman, president of the Intercept Brazil. Drilled is distributed by Bush Kineen Disseries. Huge thanks to the team there, including Greta Cohen, Eric Sandler, Grace Ross, Morgan Rattner, Owen Miller, Kira Posey, Jordan McMillan, Ryan Shrevernak and Jake Flamagan. To hear the Portuguese version of this series

head over to the Intercept Brazil site or search for the Intercept Brazil's podcast feed wherever you listen to podcasts. If you're struggling to keep up with all the latest innovations in tech and what they'll mean for your life, tech tech has you covered. Get ahead of the curve with digestible downloads on some of the biggest ideas and technology. From AI and virtual reality to

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