When central Illinois farmer Steve Hess found out that his community had won a fight against Navigator CO2 Ventures, a Dallas, Texas-based company building a pipeline to transport carbon dioxide across the region for storage underground, he threw a party.
“It was exhilarating,” he said, about the 2023 win against the Black Rock-backed pipeline where local opposition “knocked down Goliath.”
At the time, Navigator was calling for eminent domain, the right of a company to purchase private land for public good, to route the Heartland Greenway pipeline through farmland across the region. The pipeline would carry liquified carbon dioxide (CO2) across the Midwest to be sequestered underground in rural Christian County. Hess, along with other local residents and landowners, was adamantly against it. They worried about the risks if the pipeline broke.
Now, the Illinois legislature is considering a bill that would ban companies from using eminent domain to seize land for CO2 pipelines. The bill was brought to the state legislature by Hess, Sangamon County resident Kathleen Campbell, and other members of the Coalition to Stop CO2 Pipelines, the group that formed in 2022 to fight Navigator and other CO2 pipelines in Illinois.
Hess is a fifth-generation farmer growing corn and soybeans in rural McDonough County. The land he farms was homesteaded by his wife’s family in 1869. “Roots run deep here,” Hess said.
He first heard about the Heartland Greenway pipeline in December 2021, when he received a letter in the mail from Navigator. The following year, land agents came out to his property to look at the land they wanted for an easement in order to build the 1,300-mile pipeline.
They were standing in the barnyard when Hess asked the agent what he could do to negotiate with Navigator. “He says, ‘If we get approval and you don’t like it, we can just use eminent domain and put the pipe in anyhow.’ And that really struck me the wrong way,” Hess said.
When exercising the right of eminent domain, an entity can purchase private land, without the permission of the landowner, for the public good. While it’s often used to build public infrastructure like roads, sewage, and water and electrical lines, there’s a long history of using eminent domain to discriminate against Black communities. Eminent domain has also been used by oil and gas companies to build pipelines.
In Illinois, the Midwest’s many miles of cornfields produce large amounts of corn ethanol, making the region a destination for carbon capture and sequestration. Ethanol is one of the easiest industries to de-carbonize because the emissions from ethanol production contain only CO2 and water. That means storing the carbon only involves dehydrating the emissions before transporting or sequestering them underground. If there aren’t sequestration opportunities on site, for either geologic or economic reasons, then a pipeline needs to be built to transport the CO2 from the capture site to the storage location.
Some states have additional regulations around eminent domain. After opposition to the Heartland Greenway pipeline in Iowa, the state passed a bill in January banning the use of eminent domain for CO2 pipelines.
Kathleen Campbell remembers when she got her own letter from Navigator in the mail. It was December 2021 when she and her husband opened the mailer, which detailed the pipeline plans and sought an easement across their one acre of property in Glenarm. The letter informed Campbell and her husband that if they were unable to come to a voluntary agreement with Navigator, the company could request eminent domain from the Illinois Commerce Commission.
Soon after this, Campbell, Hess, and other local landowners formed the Coalition to Stop CO2 Pipelines, which eventually succeeded in stopping Navigator in 2023 and later, the proposed Iowa-Illinois Wolf pipeline in 2024.
The Coalition helped with the Safe CCS Act, a piece of state legislation to regulate carbon capture, before its passage in 2024. But during the negotiations, the final bill lost all mention of eminent domain. Hess and Campbell knew that they needed to continue the pressure to take eminent domain for CO2 pipelines off the table.
First, Hess got policy passed in the Illinois Farm Bureau to adopt an official stance against eminent domain for CO2 pipelines. Then, in 2025, he went to his legislator, Democratic state Sen. Michael Halpin, and asked if he would help with eminent domain legislation. Halpin went on to introduce SB2842 in this year’s legislative session, the bill that, if passed, would ban CO2 pipelines from using eminent domain.
Campbell reached out to her own representative, Republican state Sen. Steve McClure, to get him on the case, too. He agreed to co-sponsor SB2842. “Landowner rights and public safety should override monetary profit,” McClure said. “I’m going to always err on the side of landowner rights and public safety.”
McClure said there’s a chance that the bill will be rolled into an omnibus package before the state legislative session ends on May 31. If that doesn’t happen, McClure said, the bill could get taken up again in the fall.
The bill is a bipartisan effort with 22 cosponsors as of May 18, and endorsements from across industries. “We’ve got the Sierra Club, Illinois Environmental Council, Farm Bureau and the Soybean (Association). How many bills do you know that have that combination?” Campbell said.
Read the full version of this article online at illinoistimes.com. This story was originally published in the Daily Yonder. For more rural reporting and small-town stories visit dailyyonder.com.
This article appears in May 28-June 3, 2026.
The stunning ignorance of these pipelines cannot be overstated. The whole “carbon dioxide is a pollutant “ fraud underlies it. It’s freakin’ plant food, people.