What Is Line 3?
This is not just another pipeline. It is a tar sands climate bomb; if completed, it will facilitate the production of crude oil for decades to come.
– Louise Erdrich
Canadian oil giant Enbridge Energy’s proposed Line 3 tar sands oil pipeline would cut 337 miles across northern Minnesota, carrying 760,000 barrels of heavy crude oil per day from Alberta, Canada, to Superior, Wisconsin. One of the last major tar sands expansion projects in North America, Line 3 would damage the climate as much as 50 new coal plants, and cut across the 1854 and 1855 treaty territory of the Anishinaabe people and the headwaters of the Mississippi River. It would make Minnesotans less safe by bringing more toxic oil through our state for export and filling northern communities with out-of-state workers in a pandemic.
Line 3 has been proposed as a replacement for an older, existing pipeline which is part of Enbridge’s Mainline System. Much of the proposed Line 3 route (red line on the below map) would be a new corridor that does not currently have Enbridge pipelines. The company proposes to leave most of the old line in place underground. The new Line 3 would be physically larger, designed to carry heavier oil, and in a different trench from its predecessor. It is more properly described as a new pipeline rather than a replacement.
“There is nowhere worse on earth to have an oil sands pipeline system than the Great Lakes region. It is, everything else aside, the world’s worst planning.”
– Rachel Havrelock, founder of University of Illinois Freshwater Lab
This climate-bomb pipeline would carry hundreds of thousands of barrels of tar sands oil a day — equivalent to 50 coal plants with a carbon footprint exceeding the entire current output of Minnesota. Similar in size to the just cancelled Keystone XL, Line 3 would extend the economic viability of the Alberta Tarsands for 10-20 years. The pipeline violates treaties that establish the right of Ojibwe people to hunt, fish, and gather along the route and threatens 200 bodies of water, including the Mississippi River and the Great Lakes.
How We Resist
Tribal nations, landowners, community and climate groups in Minnesota are facing off to stop Enbridge Energy from completing the massive Line 3 pipeline in Northern Minnesota. After seven years of battling the Pipeline through the courts and permitting process the fight has now turned to frontline action led by Indigenous water protectors, which aims to delay construction long enough to mount a national campaign to push the Biden administration to revoke permits and allow one of multiple legal challenges to play out.