Phasing Out the Enbridge Mainline Oil Pipelines

Northern Minnesota, the homeland of the Anishinaabe, is known for its lakes, loons, wild rice, and tall birch and pines–but beneath the land runs a superhighway of enormous oil pipelines transporting nearly 3 million barrels of dirty tar sands oil per day from Alberta, Canada, into the United States. This corridor of pipelines is called the Enbridge Mainline, owned by Canadian corporation Enbridge Energy.

Tar sands oil is a particularly dirty form of oil: extracted from beneath the boreal forests of the Athabasca region of Canada, it emits ~21% more greenhouse gases than conventional crude oil, making it one of the most climate damaging fossil fuels still in use today. Because of how thick the oil is, it is also significantly more difficult to clean up when it spills, particularly from water-rich environments like northern Minnesota, and Enbridge has a track record of repeatedly spilling oil across Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

We know that to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of climate change, we need to keep remaining fossil fuels in the ground. Demand for oil in Minnesota has been decreasing since 2005–but Enbridge Energy wants to continue increasing the oil it pumps beneath our land and lakes to export across the world.

Minnesota already suffered 4 aquifer breaches during the construction of Enbridge’s Line 3 in 2021, which was built over the opposition of Minnesota’s own Department of Commerce, four tribal nations, climate and Indigenous rights advocates, and 94% of public comments. In Wisconsin, Enbridge has admitted to being in trespass across the Bad River Band’s reservation, and the state of Michigan has revoked Enbridge’s easement for its Line 5 pipeline where it crosses the Straits of Mackinac. Across the Great Lakes region, the rights of Anishinaabe people to hunt, fish, gather, and exist in their homelands as they have since time immemorial have been infringed upon by the construction of these pipelines and the oil spills that follow.

Who is using these 3 million barrels of oil per day? Do we need to keep these pipelines operating? MCEA decided to ask an expert.

Read the full report here

Researcher Peter Erickson drafted a white paper investigating these questions, and revealed some interesting findings:

1. Less than 60% of the oil transported through Minnesota on the Enbridge Mainline is used in the Midwest.
2. Oil demand in the Midwest is peaking, meaning the era of oil pipeline expansion can end and regulators should prepare to scale back the pipeline system.
3. Even under Trump’s pro-fossil-fuel policies and with no holistic shifts in society, we could begin decommissioning Enbridge pipelines in Minnesota by 2030 with minimal market impacts.

4. If the Enbridge Mainline continues to operate, an increasing percentage of the oil transported through Minnesota will be for export, serving to expand Enbridge’s market share of a finite and stagnant global demand.

   We can phase out the Enbridge Mainline and ensure our communities’ energy needs are met.

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   Top 3 Reasons to Phase Out the Enbridge Mainline in Minnesota:

   1) Climate Justice: The oil transported through the Enbridge Mainline pipelines in northern Minnesota (Lines 1, 2, 4, 65, 67, and 3 (93)) generate over 1 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year–that’s the equivalent of around 250-300 coal plants. These emissions are directly attributable to the pipelines Minnesota hosts because tar sands oil is prohibitively expensive to move by rail or truck; without pipelines to move it, the oil stays in the ground.

   2) Enbridge Can’t Be Trusted With Our Water: Enbridge averaged 1 oil spill every 20 days between 2002-2018. In water-rich environments like northern Minnesota, a spill can be catastrophic, especially because tar sands oil rarely floats like conventional oil; instead, it sinks or becomes suspended in the water, making cleanup nearly impossible. Enbridge is responsible for two of the largest inland oil spills in U.S. history, in Minnesota and Michigan–but even the smaller “pinhole” leaks pose a huge risk: on Enbridge’s newest pipeline, Line 3 (also known as 93), the spill detection equipment only detects a leak of over 1% of the pipeline’s volume. On a pipeline that transports 760,000 barrels of oil a day, that means 7,000 barrels of oil (almost 300,000 gallons) could be leaking without raising any alarms. We can reduce the risk Enbridge poses to our water by reducing the number of pipelines the company operates in Minnesota.

   3) Indigenous Sovereignty: Anishinaabe people have inhabited the land we now know as northern Minnesota for hundreds of years, having migrated there following a prophecy to go “where the food grows on the water,” which led them to the manoomin, or wild rice. The Anishinaabe people have inherent rights to hunt, fish, gather, travel, hold ceremony, and exist on the land, which the United States–and by extension, Minnesota–have promised to respect and protect under the Treaties of 1837, 1854, and 1855. The ecological destruction that comes with pipeline construction, climate change, and oil spills infringes on those rights and breaks the promise that the United States government made to the Anishinaabe. MCEA understands honoring our constitutional treaty responsibilities to be a core responsibility as a legal organization and as residents of Minnesota.

   Sources:  Midwest based on EIA’s Petroleum Administration for Defense Districts, or PADDs; “Midwest” is a 15-state region: North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=4890 

    Timothy Donaghy, Dangerous Pipelines: Enbridge’s History of Spills Threatens Minnesota Waters, Greenpeace (Nov. 2018), available here.