With Oil Now Flowing Through Line 3, Activists Vow to Keep Fighting

By Joseph Winters, Grist

Months of protests and a six-year legal battle culminated on Thursday, when the Canadian oil company Enbridge announced that work on its controversial new Line 3 pipeline was “substantially completed,” and that oil would begin flowing across northern Minnesota on Friday.

Line 3 “will soon deliver the low cost and reliable energy that people depend on every day,” said Al Monaco, Enbridge’s president and CEO, in a press release.

The $3 billion project was billed by Enbridge as a replacement for its existing pipeline, which was built in the 1960s and had begun to corrode. The new Line 3 will double the pipeline’s capacity, enabling the company to transport 760,000 barrels a day from tar sands in Alberta to refineries in the U.S. Midwest — traveling through Anishinaabe territory in the process.

“The U.S. has tragically failed once again to honor our treaties and protect the water that sustains all life on Mother Earth,” the Indigenous Environmental Network wrote in a press release responding to Enbridge’s announcement. Tania Aubid, a member of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, said in a statement that the company’s actions showed “a blatant disregard for tribal nations.”