Taking the path of least resistance
As new pipelines stall on the Great Plains, oil pressure builds in the Great Lakes
Cannon Ball, N.D. — A whiff of violence lingered in the campfire smoke at the Dakota Access Pipeline protest camp along the Missouri River last fall, where hundreds of protesters put their bodies on the line to stop the $3.7 billion project.
Some were Native Americans worried about the risk the oil line poses to the river — drinking water source for the nearby Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.
Some were environmental activists worried that the line would add to atmospheric carbon levels and climate change by whisking 470,000 barrels per day of the North Dakota shale oil to market, both in the United States and abroad.
A few were from the Hollywood tribe, using their fame to draw attention to both global warming and centuries of injustices suffered by Native Americans.
All of them went about their days under the thwack-thwack of a surveillance helicopter — the eyes for the hundreds of law enforcement officers decked out in riot gear on the far side of a razor-wire barricade about Online at
Fierce protests: A look at the fight against a new pipeline in North Dakota.
The financial picture: Companies are looking toward profits in the future with new, expanded lines. “The Enbridge Mainline system is the largest in the country. A lot of oil goes through there. Much more than people understand.” Millions of barrels of oil per day, the collective capacity of the Enbridge pipeline system running into Superior.
Bonus coverage: Photo galleries, videos and interactive graphic.
a mile up the road.
The protesters won that battle; the Dakota line was put on hold by the administration of President Barack Obama.
But the controversy the pipeline unleashed will not be buried anytime soon. The work on the 1,200-mile steel tube is all but complete; the big question remaining is how to finish it in a manner that will respect the tribe’s concerns over potential spills into the Missouri River and the destruction of nearby areas it considers sacred.
The conflict is, in fact, only the latest chapter in the increasingly contentious saga over how — and whether — to bring North America’s unconventional oil reserves to market.
An earlier chapter ended in late 2015 after scientists, protesters and politicians persuaded Obama to reject the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that would have carried Alberta tar sands oil toward the Gulf of Mexico.
But there is another act in this drama that has, so far, drawn relatively scant attention.
It is one in which a pipeline route carved more than 60 years ago has continually — and quietly — grown in capacity to the point that today the pipes are bursting with oil, sometimes literally so.
As pipeline protests have raged out West for the last decade, ever-growing volumes of North American oil have been discreetly flowing through the far more populous Great Lakes region, under its forests, rivers, ponds, wetlands, cities and towns and even, in one extreme case, across the bottom of the Great Lakes themselves.
This is the story of what could be called the Great Lakes XXL — a swelling, invisible river of oil flowing through the world’s largest freshwater system at a time when other regions on the continent are rejecting the risk of new pipelines.
Law of physics
It was an unusually balmy day in November 2015 when Obama took the podium in the West Wing’s Roosevelt Room to announce he had decided to kill plans for Keystone XL.
Supporters viewed the project as a job generator and a key to a more secure energy future for the United States.
Opponents criticized it as a ploy by Canadian oil interests — stymied in efforts to build new pipelines to ports in British Columbia — to get their gritty crude to the Gulf of Mexico for refining and export around the world. This would fuel competitive development overseas, they said, and further exacerbate global warming.
One prominent environmental scientist stated it would be “game over” for limiting climate change if the U.S. and Canada proceeded down the path of further exploiting the vast Alberta tar sands and other unconventional oil reserves, including Bakken shale oil from North Dakota.
After the federal government spent the better part of a decade reviewing the Keystone XL proposal, Obama concluded it was more trouble than it was worth.
He said his decision was based on the argument that tar sands oil is a particularly dangerous commodity for the climate because of the amount of energy needed to extract and refine it. And if the U.S. government approved the project, it would diminish its ability to lean on other countries to limit their own carbon emissions.
The move riled pipeline supporters — U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) called it a “sickening” decision that would cost tens of thousands of jobs — as much as it buoyed conservationists, and not just because of the global warming implications.
They also opposed Keystone XL because if the pipeline leaked — and history shows most pipes eventually do leak — it threatened to pollute the Great Plains and pockets of the Ogallala aquifer that lie below.
Yet amid all the dejection and elation on the day Keystone XL was denied, one law of physics seemed to have been forgotten. Like water, tar sands crude flows down the path of least resistance.
And for the last two decades that path has increasingly run straight toward the Great Lakes — and through the hearts of Wisconsin and Michigan.
Montana, South Dakota and Nebraska — total population of less than 4 million — were spared exposure to Keystone XL’s 830,000 barrels per day. Same with the Ogallala aquifer, a rapidly depleting underground freshwater reserve somewhat insulated from surface pollution by cake-like layers of clay, sand, rock, silt and gravel.
Yet pipes capable of carrying roughly three times the volume of oil proposed for TransCanada’s Keystone XL already run down a rival company’s pipeline from Alberta into Wisconsin. And much more oil could be on the way — both from Canada and, perhaps, from the Bakken fields of North Dakota.
There is nothing on the continent like this ever-expanding pipeline network, owned by Canada’s Enbridge Inc. and its subsidiaries, and not just because it runs to the shores of the Great Lakes, a drinking water source for some 40 million people.
“The Enbridge Mainline system is the largest in the country,” said Paul Blackburn, an attorney who has represented a number of environmental groups in legal battles, including against Keystone XL. “A lot of oil goes through there. Much more than people understand.”
In fact, the system’s current capacity is equal to roughly 20% of the nation’s total oil imports. Enbridge also has plans for a new thousand-mile pipeline from Alberta to Superior that would add another 370,000 barrels per day to that flow, bringing the capacity for some 3 million barrels of oil to flow into Wisconsin each day.
That is more than all the oil the U.S. imports on an average daily basis from Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Mexico — combined. It is more oil than is consumed daily by Germany, Europe’s economic engine and fourth largest economy in the world.
High risk, low reward?
If it sounds surprising that Wisconsin has become such a player in the booming unconventional oil economy, it’s because the state isn’t actually much of a player economically. Most of the oil simply flows through on its way to far-flung refineries.
Calumet Superior Refining, Wisconsin’s only refinery, merely sips from the Enbridge stream. It has a processing capacity of about 45,000 barrels
per day — less than 2% of the pipeline system’s capacity.
The oil that doesn’t get refined in Superior moves on, with much of it first going to dozens of huge holding tanks at Enbridge’s Superior facility, a few hundred feet from the Nemadji River that flows into nearby Lake Superior. These tanks can collectively hold about 13 million barrels of oil, enough to supply more than 60% of the daily U.S. oil diet.
The oil is cycled through these tanks into an underground tangle of pipes and pumped to out-of-state refineries. It rumbles around the clock and around the calendar along a vast, invisible infrastructure as essential as the power lines, water mains, sewers, cell towers and ribbons of concrete that make modern life possible.
More than 500,000 barrels a day can flow in a pipe that runs across Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It briefly splits into two pipelines lying exposed on the bottom of the Straits of Mackinac that divide Lakes Michigan and Huron. On the other side of the Straits, the pipes merge back into a single tube for a final run across Michigan’s Lower Peninsula to the Ontario refinery city of Sarnia, northeast of Detroit.
Most of the oil leaving Superior runs in three pipelines down the middle of Wisconsin along an 80-foot-wide corridor stretching to the Illinois border. Much of it then flows to regional refineries to be turned into gasoline, diesel and other petroleum products.
Some of it moves easterly across Indiana and lower Michigan, headed for Sarnia and beyond. Oil now also flows in an Enbridge pipe east from Sarnia to Montreal, where it can be pumped onto tankers and shipped around the globe.
This was a primary criticism of the Keystone XL — that the U.S. would be used as a conduit for Canadian tar sands oil to flow to competing markets overseas.
In the critics’ view, the U.S. increasingly assumes much of the risk of oil transport, including spills, while getting little economic reward as the fuel makes it way toward rival economies before being burned off and unleashing its carbon into the atmosphere.
The same concern now exists with North Dakota shale oil because the U.S. recently lifted a 40-year ban on exporting most domestically produced oil. The result: Last April, the first shipment of North Dakota crude left a Louisiana port for a refinery in the Netherlands.
Thanks to new fracking extraction techniques, production of North Dakota shale oil grew from less than 100,000 barrels in 2005 to more than 1 million barrels per day by 2015, even though U.S. oil consumption dropped in the same time period by about 1 million barrels per day, thanks to fuel-efficient cars and other conservation moves.
Alberta tar sands production is also booming and is in the neighborhood of 2.5 million barrels per day. At the same time, oil prices have plummeted in recent years from over $100 per barrel to less than $30, though the price has been on an uptick lately and now sits around $50 per barrel.
Both Canadian and North Dakota leaders see the economic potential to sell more oil overseas.
“Lifting the ban on crude exports will create jobs, grow our economy and keep the price of gasoline lower at the pump for consumers,” U.S. Sen. John Hoeven of North Dakota, a member of the Senate Energy Committee, said when the first barrels of shale oil left for Europe.
“Importantly, it will also bolster national security by providing our allies with alternative sources of oil and free them, as well as us, from reliance on energy from unstable parts of the world. We are just beginning to see the benefits to our state and our nation.”
Drop by drop
Enbridge had pursued its own new line from North Dakota to Wisconsin, but last year put those plans on hold after it announced its intentions to invest in the recently halted Dakota Access line owned by Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners.
But Enbridge has said it may revive plans for the North Dakota-Wisconsin pipeline if the market demands. In the meantime, the company has other plans for Wisconsin.
As it prepares for a new line from Alberta to Superior, the company is also mulling plans for a new line from Superior, through Wisconsin, to the Illinois border. That pipe alone could be built to carry more than double the amount planned for the Dakota Access line. And it could one day mean the Enbridge system would be capable of carrying some 3 million barrels per day of oil through the middle of Wisconsin.
How could all this oil flow through such a water-blessed and populated part of the country with little debate or protest when there has been so much rancor over the smaller and more remote Keystone XL and Dakota lines?
Mostly because Enbridge has had pipelines in Wisconsin for so long that their existence predates today’s concerns about climate change and other environmental problems related to the transport of oil.
The company also has a history of building its pipeline network in a piecemeal fashion that makes it difficult for outsiders to see the big picture.
Enbridge has done so by laying largecapacity pipelines that initially carry much lower volumes of oil. And then, new pump station after new pump station, pressure is ratcheted up on those lines to the point that they end up with flows that are XL-sized and larger. Some examples:
When Enbridge’s newest pipeline running through Wisconsin opened in 2009, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources evaluated it as a line that would carry 400,000 barrels per day. That number grew to 560,000 barrels per day by 2014. It will soon be carrying 1.2 million barrels per day.
When Enbridge’s newest pipeline running from western Canada to Wisconsin also opened in 2009, it had a permitted capacity of 500,000 barrels per day. In 2014, the volume was bumped to 570,000 barrels per day. The next year the volume jumped to 800,000 barrels per day, though the company has yet to secure required U.S. presidential approval to carry the additional volume across the U.S.-Canadian border. Enbridge has avoided that regulatory hurdle by pulling oil out of the pipe where it actually crosses the border and channeling it into an adjacent line that has extra capacity in its permit. Environmentalists have sued the U.S. State Department for allowing what they call an illegal “switcheroo,” but the oil continues to flow.
When Enbridge’s first line through Wisconsin, Line 6A, opened in 1968, it had a capacity of roughly 300,000 barrels. Today it has a capacity of nearly 700,000 barrels. The line itself never got larger. The volume boost was achieved largely by cranking up pressure on a steel tube that is today nearly 50 years old.
Line 6B, a sister pipeline to 6A, burst in Michigan in 2010 and spilled more than 1 million gallons of tar sands crude. It was the largest on-land oil spill in U.S. history. Enbridge later decided that the existing line, which also began operating in 1968, was too deteriorated to salvage. So it shut it down and opened a new version of the line in 2014. This replacement actually doubled the old line’s operating capacity at the time of the spill to 500,000 barrels per day.
“It’s really deceiving to call that a replacement,” said Doug Hayes, staff attorney for the Sierra Club Environmental Law Program.
But he said the Enbridge strategy has worked, both in clearing regulatory hurdles and avoiding North Dakota-style public protests.
“Enbridge has taken a different approach, which is sort of piecing together a whole network based on incremental pipeline expansions,” he said, “and really avoiding the scrutiny some of these other big pipelines are getting.”
Enbridge has had pipelines in Wisconsin for so long that their existence predates today’s concerns about climate change and other environmental problems related to the transport of oil.