Pipelines

A natural gas meter. (Getty Images)

Federal agency threatens funding reduction over South Dakota’s lax pipeline safety enforcement

BY: - November 7, 2023

Federal regulators say they’ll reduce grant funding to South Dakota if the state doesn’t do a better job preventing excavation damage to buried pipelines.  The warning came in a letter this month from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), after a July review. For the second year in a […]

A roughly drawn map of the two liquid carbon pipelines' proposed paths. (Illustration by Joshua Haiar/South Dakota Searchlight)

Judge says Iowa’s pipeline land survey law is constitutional

BY: - May 12, 2023

An Iowa district court judge decided this week that a state law is constitutional that allows land surveys for carbon dioxide pipelines regardless of landowners’ consent, according to court records. The ruling — in a Hardin County case — is at odds with another judge’s ruling last week in Clay County, which said the law does not […]

District Associate Judge Shawna Ditsworth is considering a request to dismiss a trespassing charge against a carbon pipeline surveyor. (Photo by Seth Boyes/Dickinson County News)

Pipeline trespassing case against SD man goes to court in Iowa

BY: - December 16, 2022

A company that wants to build a sprawling carbon dioxide pipeline in northwest Iowa should have obtained a court order before attempting to survey private land from which it had been previously barred, a Dickinson County prosecutor argued Thursday. At issue is a trespassing charge against Stephen James Larsen, 28, of Arlington, South Dakota, who […]