Dakota Access CEO: Company focused on completing project

The company developing the $3.8 billion Dakota Access pipeline says it is committed to the project, despite strong opposition and a federal order to halt construction near an American Indian reservation in North Dakota.

The memo to employees, which was also released to some media outlets, is the first time in months the company has provided significant details of the four-state, 1,172-mile (1886-km) project. It came the same day as a planned “day of action” in cities around the U.S. and in other countries, including a rally that drew hundreds in Washington to hear Sen. Bernie Sanders and others speak. Authorities also arrested 22 people for interfering with construction on the pipeline about 70 miles (113 km) northwest of the main protest site near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota.

Energy Transfer Partners CEO Kelcy Warren said in the memo to employees Tuesday that the four-state project is nearly 60 percent complete and that “concerns about the pipeline’s impact on the local water supply are unfounded.” The 1,172-mile project would carry nearly a half-million barrels of crude oil daily from North Dakota’s oil fields through South Dakota and Iowa to an existing pipeline in Patoka, Illinois.

“I am confident that as long as the government ultimately decides the fate of the project based on science and engineering, the Dakota Access Pipeline will become operational … So we will continue to obey the rules and trust the process,” he wrote.

The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in North Dakota is suing federal regulators for approving the oil pipeline, arguing it will harm water supplies and disturb sacred burial and cultural sites.

The tribe is challenging the Army Corps of Engineers’ choice to give around 200 permits at water intersections for the pipeline, which goes through the Dakotas and Iowa to Illinois. The tribe says the project will disturb sacred sites and impact drinking water. Energy Transfer Partners disputes those claims, saying the pipeline would include safeguards and that workers monitoring the pipeline remotely could close valves within three minutes if a breach is detected.

“We have designed the state-of-the-art Dakota Access pipeline as a safer and more efficient method of transporting crude oil than the alternatives being used today,” his memo said.

The tribe’s effort to temporarily block construction close to its reservation was denied by U.S District Judge James Boasberg on Friday. Be that as it may, minutes after the fact, federal officials ordered a temporary halt to construction on Army Corps land around and underneath Lake Oahe, one of six reservoirs on the Missouri River. Three federal agencies also asked ETP for a “voluntary pause” in work for 32 km on either side of Lake Oahe.
In Washington, Sanders was joined at the rally by a couple of Standing Rock Sioux members, including a girl who’d joined about a dozen people this summer in running a petition signed by 140,000 people from North Dakota to Washington. The speakers encouraged President Barack Obama, who visited the reservation in 2014, to back their cause.

Warren’s memo also noted that because of what it called “misinformation” in the news, the company is working to “communicate with the government and media more clearly in the days to come.” Warren said the company had consulted with more than 55 tribes, including the Standing Rock Sioux, and added that ETP values and respects “cultural diversity and the significant role that Native American culture plays in our nation’s history and its future and hope to be able to strengthen our relationship with the Native American communities as we move forward with this project.”