Infrastructure MAPPING Otherwise Report A no. 001 MANY HEADED HYDRA THE TEXT STRUGGLE KATIE MAZER IMAGES OVER MARTIN DANYLUK THE PHOTOS CHARMAINE DAKOTA CHUA & MADISON VAN OORT ACCESS DESIGN ELISE PIPELINE HUNCHUCK Contents Acronyms 3 00 Introduction 4 01 What is the Dakota Access Pipeline? 9 02 Protecting the Waters 12 03 The Broader Pipeline Context 18 04 Approving the DAPL: 25 Nationwide Permit No.12 05 Consolidating Control: 27 The Enbridge Example 06 Continental DAPL, Continental Fight 29 07 A Cartographic Time Series 30 08 Flashpoints: 33 A Timeline of Key Oil Pipeline Projects Notes 52 Acknowledgements 61 Acronyms bpd barrels per day DAPL Dakota Access Pipeline EEP Enbridge Energy Partners ETCOP Energy Transfer Crude Oil Pipeline ETP Energy Transfer Partners IEA International Energy Agency SLAPP strategic lawsuit against public participation SRST Standing Rock Sioux Tribe MAPPING A MANY–HEADED HYDRA 3 00 Introduction In April 2016, the Sacred Stone Camp was established at under Lake Oahe on the Missouri River, and promising the confluence of the Cannonball and Missouri Rivers, to launch a full environmental impact study.[2] At the near Cannon Ball, North Dakota, by LaDonna Brave Bull time, many hailed this as a historic victory, but with the Allard, an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux impending Trump presidency just over a month away, Tribe and tribal historian. Two years after learning about concerns mounted that the win would be fleeting.[3] plans to build a pipeline adjacent to the Standing Rock While the movement overall began to focus on other Reservation, through unceded treaty land, and under the forms of action, many water protectors vowed to remain Missouri River, the Sacred Stone and subsequent camps in the camps through the depths of the North Dakota emerged as an urgent attempt to protect ancestral burial winter. Sure enough, within his first week in office, grounds and local waterways, including the Missouri President Trump signed executive orders expediting and Cannonball Rivers, by blocking construction of the the review and approval of both the Dakota Access and Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). Importantly, not only Keystone XL Pipelines.[4] would the DAPL infringe on the tribe’s downstream water rights, it was also set to pass through 1851 and 1868 Fort While the off-reservation camps were forcibly evicted at Laramie Treaty boundaries: land that the Oceti Sakowin the end of February 2017, the tribe has vowed to continue never ceded to the U.S. government. Subsequent camps the struggle in court and in Washington and a global were established off-reservation to assert and defend this divestment campaign continues to gather steam. Beyond treaty territory. Water protectors and their allies held the DAPL, an international avowal has been issued to these camps for months, resolutely refusing to subject continue fighting the growing network of pipelines these lands and waters to the risks inherent in running an across North America.[5] oil pipeline through this territory This report goes behind the scenes of the Dakota Access Over this time, water protectors in the off-reservation Pipeline. It aims to shed light on the broader continental camps faced serious and escalating violence from police context of contemporary oil production, transportation, and private security forces: they were targeted by sound and trade in North America. Along the way, it addresses and water cannons, shot with rubber bullets and pepper themes including the geopolitics of oil, the political and spray, attacked by dogs, intimidated by riot gear and army corporate networks of power and finance that underpin tanks, and violently arrested.[1] Against this escalating the pipeline, and the industry’s strategies for getting oil to state violence deployed in defence of the oil industry, the the world market. camps continued to grow. In early December, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers finally stood down, denying When it comes to building energy infrastructure, the easement needed by Energy Transfer Partners to drill recent years have been marked by incredible dynamism. MAPPING A MANY–HEADED HYDRA 4 Repeatedly, where industry has proposed pipelines, people of North American oil pipeline proposals and efforts to have resisted, forcing companies to reconfigure their plans. protect waters and lands from these infrastructures, this The result has been an intimate, dynamic, and fraught report draws attention to the interconnectedness of North dialectic between the pushers of these infrastructure American pipeline projects. projects and the communities and movements working to protect lands, waters, and the climate. Importantly, this What becomes clear when we trace the changing contours dynamic has a continental character: while each proposed of these infrastructural and financial networks is that pipeline presents as a single or isolated project, we might the impacts of individual flashpoints like the standoff at instead think of them as flashpoints in a much larger Standing Rock ripple through the rest of the system. That ongoing struggle over the expansion of settler colonial is, these pipeline projects exist not plainly in competition, extractive capitalism on Turtle Island. In taking stock of but in relation to one another. This is reflected not only in the broader landscape of energy infrastructure, it is this the strategies used by the industry, but also in the tactics continental dynamic that this report aims to illustrate. and geographies of solidarity and resistance to the DAPL In this sense, it is not a report about the Dakota Access and other pipelines across North America. This was on Pipeline—others are much better positioned to provide clear display when water defenders resolutely refused to authoritative accounts and analyses of this struggle and abandon the camps after the Army Corps of Engineers the deep historical context that informs it.[6] Rather, denied the easement for the final portion of the pipeline in here, by surveying and mapping the dynamic nature December.[7] By maintaining that the fight was not over Mapping 2. Projects come back to life, sometimes multiple times. Over the course of the years covered in this report, the several projects have been repeatedly revived. Northern Gateway, for example, was first proposed in 2002, then Many–Headed Hydra: shelved in 2006 in favour of focusing on new lines to Key Dynamics U.S. markets. The company then revived the project in 2008 due to demand from producers and refiners. It At the end of this report, in Section 07 and 08 (beginning was ultimately rejected by the Liberal government of on page 33), you will find a series of visuals that Justin Trudeau in November 2016, on the same day illustrate the flux and contestation surrounding the that he approved two other major projects: the Kinder North American oil pipeline network. While there are Morgan Trans Mountain project and the Enbridge Line many dynamics at play in these images, below are three 3 “replacement,” the largest project in Enbridge history. key ones to keep in mind: We see here, again, the relationship between the multiple lives of these lines and the status of other projects, 1. Pipelines exist in relation to each other. The market conditions, resistance, and political climate.[2] conditions for one project change very quick depending on the status of other projects, market conditions, 3. The economic justification for pipelines is always resistance, political climate, and so on. For example, shifting. Over the years represented here, the justification in 2011 U.S. President Barack Obama announced that for why these pipeline projects are needed has shifted he would delay the approval of Keystone XL by at least back and forth between two main poles: one, the lines are a year. In reaction to this, the government of Stephen needed as a way to move oil to markets; and two, pipeline Harper aggressively asserted energy exports as a construction is needed as a form of economic stimulus. top government priority and claimed that diversifying After President Obama’s delay in approving Keystone markets away from the U.S. was a “strategic imperative” XL, for example, the Canadian government emphasised for Canada. Holding up Asia as the key target market, the imperative of moving tar sands oil to tidewater to the Canadian government turned its attention to pushing enable it to fetch world prices. More recently, industry forward the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline. Then, and governments have been focused on the economic as resistance mounted to Northern Gateway we see the benefits of the infrastructure itself. In Canada, since the introduction of proposals for the Kinder Morgan Trans crash in oil prices starting in 2014, industry advocates Mountain Expansion and for TransCanada’s Energy have been arguing that private pipeline expansion is an East.[1] effective form of national economic stimulus.[3] These dynamics are also explored in Section 03. MAPPING A MANY–HEADED HYDRA 5 until the project was cancelled, protesters invoked the geographies of industry’s expansion plans and the extensive social and ecological geographies surrounding fragmentation of approval processes so as to obscure these and impacted by the pipeline that defy the boundaries of networks. But these continental networks are reflected the company’s tidy maps. right back in the transnational and organizing tactics that communities are using to stop this growing network of pipe. By highlighting some of the networks surrounding the Finally, the situation with North American energy DAPL and the struggle at Standing Rock, this report infrastructure is changing quickly, and increasingly illustrates that the Dakota Access is fundamentally so under the Trump administration. This report is transnational not only for its entrenchment in transnational not intended to be a real-time account.[9] Rather, by networks of infrastructure, commodity flows, and finance, contextualizing the Dakota Access Pipeline within the but also in a much more basic way.