S15, Ep 1 | The Carbon Goldrush

Amy: [00:00:00] In early September 2025, a handful of Brazilian government officials headed to North Dakota on a mission. It was a technical mission. They were there to see a shiny new green technology in action. 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 more oil out. Some of it would surely still stay underground, and if you tilted your head and squinted a bit, that made it a climate solution.

The American company selling the [00:01:00] Brazilians on this idea had a lot riding on these officials believing that carbon capture connected to ethanol was a great green success story, win-win for industry and the environment, an American dream they could take home to Brazil. But had the visiting bureaucrats scanned the local newspapers, they might have found a different story.

Facebook ad: If you live in Iowa, your land, your water, and your voice could all be at risk thanks to a man named Bruce Rastetter.

Carolyn Raffensperger: 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.

Amy: On September second, 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 [00:02:00] Dakota. It's called the Midwest Carbon Express Project.

Harold Hamm, 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 founder and executive chairman of its parent company, Summit Agricultural Group. For all their cheerleading of the project to visitors, the Summit Pipeline is years behind schedule and facing multiple political and legal roadblocks.

In fact, it's managed to do what almost no politician, issue, or campaign has been able to do in the US for years, united far left and far right populous. 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. [00:03:00] Anyone who remotely follows politics or agriculture, you say Rastetter, you're gonna get a response. Jess Mazour is the conservation coordinator for the Sierra Club Iowa. For Jess, 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, that guy did this," or, "That guy put a factory farm near my house," or, "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. Um, kind of secretive. 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 ethanol business. As [00:04:00] a longtime climate reporter, I keep waiting for people to stop calling corn ethanol green. Its carbon footprint is similar to regular old 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 a way to keep it alive. And in 2022, Congress handed it its latest lifeline. The Inflation Reduction Act contains some really incredible things for our shareholders. 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 [00:05:00] continuing to attain new markets, uh, the ethanol industry is in jeopardy.

So that's what lowering carbon scores, this project on the pipeline is, is about with 34 ethanol plants across the upper Midwest, but in particular Iowa Summit 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, FS Fueling 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: [00:06:00] Carbon Cowboys. I'm Amy Westervelt, and this season we've partnered with the amazing reporters at The Intercept Brazil to learn more about what Rastetter is doing down there.

Felipe: I'm Felipe Sabrina with The Intercept Brazil. I will be hosting the Portuguese version of the season over on The Intercept Brazil feed. This is a story about how the ethanol kingpin of Iowa became the king of corn in Brazil.

Amy: 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, Felipe 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 [00:07:00] love pigs.

When Felipe sent me a picture of this pig statue, I, I was kind of shook. I- if you're imagining some sort of tasteful bronze statue, think again. This is a massive porky pig-looking thing wearing lederhosen and a bright green hat, holding a corn cob.

Felipe: And it even has a name, Luquinha, or Little Lucas, because the town is called Lucas do Rio Verde.

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. Around 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 You see star in Lucas do Rio Verde, a city of opportunities.

[Lucas do Rio Verde promo video]

Amy: This audio you're listening to with the epic background music is from a promotional video by the Lucas do Rio Verde city government, highlighting the wonders 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 two million tons of grain 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 grain pouring out of machines. Lucas do Rio Verde is all money, growth, and seas of corn and soybeans as far as the eye can see.

Felipe: 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 [00:09:00] 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, agricultural machinery stores, supply stores, credit banks, and real estate agencies. Trucks over 20 meters long, loaded with soybeans or corn, have plenty of space to drive around or park on the curb. Walking in Lucas, on the other hand, is a challenge because of the distances between the 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 [00:10:00] 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 seem to mind. The image of abundant harvests has drawn people from all over the country to Lucas.

Isabella, translation: My husband was unemployed for two years. Then we saw a report about the city, which is a very good place to live, to raise children, even in terms of violence. So we packed our bags.

Amy: Isabella is from Minas Gerais, a Brazilian state southeast of Lucas. But since 2021, she's been living here with her husband and children. She sells açaí bowls in front of the parking lot of a multinational grain company. Açaí is a fruit typical of the Amazon. Isabella buys it from suppliers and sells it to [00:11:00] truck drivers who load and unload grain here. She passes small bowls of açaí 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.

Isabella, translation: For me in the city, I don't think anyone can complain about healthcare.

Amy: She says the Lucas do Rio Verde Hospital São Lucas, in particular, is especially nice. It's run today by a partnership between the city and agribusiness entrepreneurs.

Isabella, translation: Now, they've opened a really nice ward, too. The whole hospital has been renovated.

Amy: In fact, the new maternity ward at the São Lucas Hospital has a promotional video, too. And a few seconds into it, listeners might recognize [00:12:00] a not-so-Brazilian-sounding name.

[Lucas hospital promo]

Bruce Rastetter, 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 after this guy? How did that happen?

Felipe: The hospital canceled my tour just before I arrived, so our producer, Marcia Reverdosa and I just showed up to see what we could see. We talked to a hospital worker in the hallway.

Amy: It's[00:13:00] a little hard to hear there because Felipe 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 Rastetter 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 and healthcare, is really common in Brazil. You just heard how when telling Felipe about what she likes about Lucas, Isabela mentioned healthcare. People think of hospitals as an example of how nice a city is or how well it's working. So if Lucas has a good hospital, no one can say that the politicians or the businessmen 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 [00:14:00] hospital is run by a foundation led by one of Rastetter's Brazilian business partners, Marino Franz. Marino's brother Paulo was the one that proposed that giant pig statue that looks out over Lucas.

And to understand how Rastetter, 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 coming up after the break.

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Lucas do Rio Verde is in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, 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 forests were preserved, and it was home to even more indigenous people than it [00:15:00] is today.

But in the 1960s and 1970s, Brazil's military government deployed a new strategy. It was called the National Integration Plan. The idea was to eliminate indigenous communities that were seen as anti-development and integrate the north and midwest of Brazil into the national economy.

1970s Brazilian propaganda film: A revolução chega à selva. Cada árvore que tomba escreve uma história bem diferente das que povoavam a terra dos

Amy: This propaganda film from the '70s celebrates the, quote, "revolution reaching the jungle," toppling trees in favor of roads. 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 Mato Grosso today were deliberate colonization projects, many of them built and funded [00:16:00] by the Brazilian government. The government offered people plots 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 Paulo, it's the Franz brothers who brought Bruce to the area.

In Paulo's telling, it all happened because of an internship he did in Iowa and an important contact he made there. Here he is talking about it on a Brazilian podcast.

Paulo Franz: Assistir jogos de futebol juntos. A gente se vê quase cada ano. O nome desse senhor é Terry Branstad.

Amy: Terry Branstad, the governor of Iowa at the time, and eventually US ambassador to China during Trump's first presidency. Paulo says they all went to soccer games together a lot. Paulo says it was Branstad [00:17:00] who introduced him to Bruce Rastetter.

Paulo Franz: O Bruce, que é o CEO da empresa, o fundador. Translation: 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, the culture, is producing ethanol from corn. So as president, I met with this Terry Branstad, who was the governor of Iowa. We met, and he wanted to buy some land here in Brazil.

Amy: 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.

Bruce Rastetter: So when we sold Hawkeye to Koch 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 [00:18:00] company, and, uh, 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 US, or because other US companies had done well there, et cetera, et cetera. It was when we were trying to verify Bruce and Paulo's differing versions of this story that our Brazil editor, Alice de Souza, found a guy with yet another version.

Kory Melby: Is this pro-ethanol? Are you tree huggers? Are you looking at this from a negative standpoint, or are you ju- are you looking at it from a neutral standpoint? I don't mind being neutral. I can be critical of this, too. Yeah. But I'm, because clients of mine have invested in upwards of a billion dollars now in Mato Grosso, I don't want to fuck this up.

Amy: That's Kory Melby, an agriculture consultant in Brazil.

Kory: I came from Northwest Minnesota [00:19:00] developing land. So of course, when in the early 2000s when Mato Grosso and all of this soybean expansion was taking place, I was gonna be the land guy for a group from some of the first guys I went down with You're gonna be here, Kory. Pick up the language, pick up the contacts. You, you can be the real estate guy. So that's where I started was from that perspective.

Amy: Full disclosure, we paid Kory Melby to be a fixer for us on the ground in Mato Grosso. The idea was that he would take us around and ideally arrange a meeting with the brothers Franz 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 ag knowledge about Brazil. Although it comes out so many times a week, I still have about 500 unread emails in a folder marked Kory.[00:20:00]

Kory: So I've been on every farm in Mato Grosso. I rode the, the boom times and the busts and the boom times and the busts again- Mm-hmm … with all my friends. So I, I, I, you know, I have that 25-year arc of experience now of the good, bad and ugly of Mato Grosso. Yeah. And, and believe me, there's plenty of all of it.

Amy: He knows a lot about Bruce and the Franz 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 Mato Grosso. He toured them around looking for land.

Kory: Back in 2011, I was visiting Curitiba, and there was a young, dynamic guy and, and he would say, "Kory, we're, we're looking to develop a, a cor- uh, a corn oil mill, process it, and investors or partner in that. W- w- we're, corn oil." So I was writing about this BS in my newsletters at the time, and also visiting [00:21:00] in Lucas do Rio Verde at the elevators at the time, talking to farmers. "Oh, corn ethanol. Corn ethanol. We gotta get corn ethanol here or we're going to bury ourselves."

Amy: Because of his newsletter and his ties to various American ag folks, Kory has kind of become known as the guy to call if you're an American who wants to get a sense of Mato Grosso. So when people started talking about corn ethanol there, it was only a matter of time before he got a call from you know who.

Kory: Summit from Iowa, which I'm sure you are very familiar with, Bruce Rastetter and Eric and then the whole club. I get a call from, uh, Bruce Rastetter, or an email. "Hey, we would like a tour of, uh, Mato Grosso. Uh, we're gonna be down there for another reason. Could, could we do something a la cart with you, Kory?"

Amy: They didn't wanna take one of Kory's prepackaged ag tours.

Kory: Okay. [00:22:00] So this is 2011. Um, we do a little quick power tour. They go home. I figure, ah, just another tour. Uh- We were looking at land. We would love to get going on some land deals Kory carried on, thinking nothing of it,

Amy: but six months or so later, he got a call from some friends in Mato Grosso

Kory: My good friend, the Franzes, you know, they were, "Kory, w- we, we want to get an ethanol mill going out here, but we, we need help. We need Americans, we need capital," etc., etc. So I was telling Bruce and the guys at the time, "You know, I've got friends down here that would love to get into ethanol. That's why I'm guys."

Amy: According to Kory, 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 Kory tells it, this is when they met the Franzes

Kory: All of a sudden, you know Brazilians being Brazilian, they go, "We've got a farm for sale." [00:23:00]

Amy: Kory helped broker the deal between Bruce and the Franzes, and it kept them all talking.

Kory: Three years to close on this damn farm, but that farm purchase then opened the door with trust and capital, "Hey, let's, uh, let's build an ethanol mill and, and Lucas together."

Amy: The Franz brothers had hit the big time. They were getting into business with the ethanol kingpin of Iowa. It was a whole new level, or as Kory calls it, cycle three

Kory: Cycle one is deforestation and cattle. Cycle two is soy. Cycle 2.5 is soy-corn, basically, you know, the, the combination. Cycle three now gets to be, um, what we would say, industrial or added value. No different than Iowa

Amy: For the Franz brothers, Bruce was a white whale. At a time of booming Brazilian industrial agriculture, he happened to have some [00:24:00] 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 Rastetter was having a really bad time back home in Iowa

Jess Mazour: Since 2012, since that big land grab attempt in Africa, he has become a dirty word in, in Iowa

Angela: 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

Emma: Friends of friends have said that he's kind of over Iowa and more interested in Brazil, which, I mean, I suppose if I was in his shoes, if I had the choice of, you know, being in a place where everybody hated me and a place where people fawned over me, I'd probably go to the place where people fawned over me

Amy: That's our story next time[00:25:00]

Disclaimer: We reached out to Bruce Rastetter, Harold Hamm, the Franz brothers, Miguel Vaz Ribeiro, and all Summit companies and Brazilian government agencies mentioned in this season for comment and have incorporated any responses we received throughout the season.

Credits: Carbon Cowboys: Cowboys of the Cerrado is a collaboration between Drilled and The Intercept Brazil. The show was reported and written by Felipe Sabrina and me, Amy Westervelt. Our editors are Audrey Quinn in the US and Alicia de Souza in Brazil. Our senior producer and sound designer is Martin Zaltz Austwick. Audio production and sound design in Brazil by Marcia Reverdoza and Felipe Mux. Theme song and original music by Eric Terena. Additional music by Martin Zaltz Austwick. Our engineer is Peter Duff. Artwork for Drilled is by Matt Fleming. US fact-checking from Naomi Barr. Brazil fact-checking by [00:26:00] Estudio Frontera. Our First Amendment attorney is James Wheaton 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 Pushkin Industries. Huge thanks to the team there, including Greta Cohen, Eric Sandler, Grace Ross, Morgan Ratner, Owen Miller, Kira Posey, Jordan McMillan, Brian Schrebernick, and Jake Flanagan. To hear the Portuguese version of this series, head over to The Intercept Brazil's site or search for The Intercept Brasil's podcast feed wherever you listen to podcasts.