A U.S. District Court judge rejected a request for a preliminary injunction about the time briefs were filed in St. Louis County District Court for a summary judgment that would temporarily stop the pipeline.

In addition, two oil companies filed a separate complaint saying Enbridge Energy  was building an unneeded pipeline, as as Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy has been contending.

In a case argued in November by Earthjustice lawyer Sarah Burt, MCEA’s Legal Director Kevin Reuther and Sierra Club’s Eric Huber, U.S. District Court Judge Donovan Frank ruled Wednesday against granting the environmental groups a preliminary injunction which would have halted construction on the Alberta Clipper pipeline through northern Minnesota.

Frank’s order said the environmental organizations had demonstrated the environment was likely to suffer irreparable injury if the line is constructed. However, Frank said in balancing that harm against the harm to Enbridge, the factors “weigh slightly in favor” of Enbridge.

Reuther said MCEA and its environmental allies, which also include Indigenous Environmental Network and National Wildlife Federation, planned to argue the full case against the pipeline in federal court later this year.

At the same time, MCEA filed its motion in St. Louis District Court seeking a summary judgment which would overturn the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission’s certificate of need and routing permits for the Alberta Clipper and Southern Lights lines until the commission completed an environmental impact statement looking at all of the environmental damage from the proposed pipelines.

Tar sands are one of the dirtiest fuels on earth. Entire forests have been destroyed in Alberta so that strip mines can be dug to remove the tar and turn it into petroleum and pump it to the United States. Besides the direct environmental damage to the wilderness and the habitats of animals and birds, tar sands oil produces at least three times as much global warming pollution as pumped oil from places such as Alaska or Saudi Arabia.

In addition, MCEA has used U.S. government reports which state that U.S. oil consumption will remain flat through 2030 and the use of imported oil will decline. That means the Alberta Clipper line is unneeded.

While it won’t help the legal case, MCEA received support for its position from an unlikely source: two Canadian oil companies. Suncor Energy, Inc and Imperial Oil, Ltd., filed nearly 500 pages with the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission recently trying to prevent Enbridge from collecting millions of dollars of tolls from them to pay for the Alberta Clipper.

“Shippers are not required to pay for a pipeline that did not need to be placed into service,” Suncor said in its filing.