They are saying biggest re capacity not land use but certainly it will eat up a lot of prime farmland, when it could have been built in traditional steel areas and destroyed zero farmland. The pellets could go by boat to say Indiana or Ohio.
The Pellet plant is to be done in about a month.....up till now they have produced none.
This whole idea might be pie in the sky......I need to see some expert analysis.
So now we’ve gone from “there aren’t enough trained workers” to “the rail logistics don’t work” to “but think of the precious farmland!”
The goalposts are moving so fast they ought to put them on the same rail line as the pellets.
And the sudden reverence for Iowa farmland is especially funny considering how many acres people are perfectly willing to cover with solar panels.
Apparently corn ground becomes sacred only when somebody proposes putting a steel mill on it.
Here’s a quaint little American concept: property rights. If a landowner decides the property is worth more to them sold for industrial development, and a company decides it is worth buying, they get to make that transaction. You don’t get to declare somebody else’s ground permanently reserved for corn because you personally think the mill ought to be in Indiana or Ohio.
If the project is economically stupid, the economics will kill it. If the pellet plant fails, the transportation costs don’t work, labor can’t be found, financing collapses, or construction costs make the whole thing uneconomic, then there’s your argument.
But endlessly cycling through workers → trains → farmland → whatever comes next just looks like searching for a reason America shouldn’t build the thing.
At this point you’re doing a remarkably good impression of a volunteer spokesman for every Chinese and Russian talking point about why the United States supposedly can’t build large industrial projects anymore.
Give it another page and I assume we’ll discover the real problem is that the steel mill might frighten the soybeans.
