By Winona LaDuke
“No one wants to have oil in their water” – Natali Segovia, Water Protector Legal Collective
It’s about the water. I’m returning to Mni Sose, the Missouri, eight years after the saga of Standing Rock – when tens of thousands of Water Protectors came to protect the river from the Dakota Access Pipeline. In August of 2016, I went to the river, summoned by Ladonna Brave Buffalo, Debra White Plume and others, both in this world and who have passed. I came for the water, because being a Water Protector is about life. Try drinking oil.
The cases grind on. Over 800 people were charged, and millions of dollars of lawyers have worked on the case. North Dakota is still seeking to get the US Government to pay for the $38 million the state expended on police forces, and that federal case was heard in March of this year in Bismarck, No Dak. Meanwhile, the federal regulators just had their first hearing on the draft of the court ordered Environmental Impact Statement, this past November in Bismarck. Just to say it again, the federally required EIS is being reviewed eight years after the pipeline was installed. That’s backwards.
The legal system is not a fast one, and it’s backed up with all sorts of stuff, including 500,000 pages of evidence just released by Energy Transfer LP (ET) in a lawsuit against Greenpeace, the international environmental organization, for its participation in the opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline. ET is charging Greenpeace with a staggering $300 million in damages for “defamation” of the company.
How do you defame an oil pipeline company? You say mean things about them.
This spring a bunch of documents were dumped into the public files in the lawsuit. One of them was a report, prepared for Greenpeace by pipeline experts, “…determined there was a “relatively high” probability that during drilling under the Missouri River at the Lake Oahe crossing, “1.4 million gallons of drilling fluids” were lost in 700 events ending up in Lake Oahe…” That’s going to be a problem for us all.
That’s a lot of drilling fluid ending up in the Missouri River. Now, what’s in drilling fluid? That’s the stuff that keeps the drill lubricated when it’s drilling deep under a river, is proprietary, but is supposed to be basically bentonite, sort of a clay stuff.
The problem is that ET was already convicted of lacing drilling fluid with toxins. ET was federally debarred by the EPA due to 48 criminal convictions in Pennsylvania stemming from concealment and failure to report drilling fluid leaks and use of unapproved additives such as diesel fuel resulting in water contamination at 21 sites during … construction of …east coast pipelines in 2017. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission also initiated proceedings against ET for releasing 2 million gallons of drilling fluid containing diesel fuel under the Tuscarawas River in Ohio in 2017 and destroying a bunch of creeks. That’s the beginning.
The question for North Dakota might be, should you trust oil companies? There’s a problem that most folks can see. North Dakota has 18 major petroleum pipelines and 9 major natural gas pipelines – 30,000 miles of pipeline or, enough pipe to cross the state 88 times. Summit’s carbon pipeline would add 333 more miles.
Who checks on pipeline safety? That’s the Pipeline and Hazadous Materials Safety Administration, or PHMSA for short, the federal agency in charge, matched with some state inspectors. The most recent federal authorization bill required that the agency have 247 pipeline inspectors on the job in fiscal 2023, but PHMSA was 40 short of that number.
There’s at least 2.6 million miles of pipeline in the US, so those 200 folks are stretched thin. And PHMSA has not yet written regulations for hydrogen and carbon dioxide pipelines. Yet, there are hundreds of miles under construction or installed already. What kind of smart guys allow projects to proceed without any safeguards or regulations?
They don’t have enough inspectors to cover the country, let alone North Dakota. Then there’s state inspectors. In North Dakota, the online advertisements both offer services and seek more pipeline inspectors.
One ad: “Looking for a fast pipeline inspection in North Dakota? FairLifts can help arrange a timely pipeline inspection and other helicopter services for you…” (https://www.fairlifts.com/construction-helicopters/pipeline-inspection/north-dakota)
And then, there’s the question of who gets to ask oil companies about their pipelines. In one hearing, ET argued that it was not required to report loss of drilling fluids or other accidents to the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (“PHMSA”) while a pipeline is under construction. (Like when the drilling fluids spilled.) That is convenient.
Maybe there’s not a problem. After all, according to AI sources, North Dakota has 37 documented cases of ground-water quality degradation. That is a result of the state changing the designations of spill reporting. For instance, this does not list the 29 million gallons of oil-contaminated “produced water” – a waste product of hydraulic fracturing , that Summitt Midstream Partners let go in 2014.
The US Department of Justice fined the company $l5 million in 2021. As the Department of Justice reported, “More than 700,000 barrels were discharged thereby contaminating Blacktail Creek and nearby land and groundwater. By law, the federal fines in this case will go to the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund used to respond and clean up future oil spills.
“Summit is being held criminally accountable for its crimes of negligently discharging more than 29 million gallons over more than 4 months and then knowingly failing to report the discharge,” said Assistant Attorney General Todd Kim of the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division. “Summit gave misleading and incomplete statements to the government about the duration and size of the spill. Through the civil and criminal cases, Summit is being held responsible for its misconduct and must implement more rigorous environmental management to prevent and detect future spills as a condition of probation.”
That’s just one company.
It’s eight years after the Dakota Access Pipeline resistance at the river. The Standing Rock tribe is still in court to close down the pipeline, the Environmental Impact Statement is in draft form, and oil still runs North Dakota.
We might need more Water Protectors. You can’t drink oil.
