Bad River Band files pair of challenges to Wisconsin DNR approved Line 5 reroute
The Bad River Band filed a pair of challenges to a proposed Line 5 reroute that was recently approved by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and still requires federal approval from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
The band is contesting the wetlands permit and filed a lawsuit against the Wisconsin DNR claiming it had an inadequate final Environmental Impact Statement that violates the Wisconsin Environmental Protection Act.
The band says that the approved reroute involves blasting, horizontal drilling or trenching through at least 186 waterways and 101 acres of high-quality wetlands that drain into Lake Superior.
This land does not belong to us, it is borrowed by us from our children’s children,” Bad River Band Chairman Robert Blanchard said in a statement. “We harvest our wild rice from the waters, we hunt from the land, fish from the lake, streams, and rivers to feed our families and gather the medicines to heal our relatives. Many of our people will feel the effects if we lose these resources.
Enbridge Energy agreed to cease transporting oil and gas through the pipes in 2020 and proposed to reroute the line by replacing 20 miles of existing pipeline – including the 12 miles currently within the reservation – with a 41-mile-long stretch of pipe around the reservation.
“The DNR failed our children when it gave Enbridge the permits to build this reroute. They failed to consider the company’s multiple disasters in Minnesota and in Michigan, which are still being cleaned up,” Blanchard said. “They failed to consider our Tribe, our water quality, and the natural resources of the entire Bad River watershed.”
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The Biden administration issued its long-awaited assessment on liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports on Tuesday, with its findings potentially complicating President-elect Donald Trump’s plans to unleash America’s energy industry.
The Department of Energy (DOE) published the study nearly a year after the administration announced in January it would pause approvals for new export capacity to non-free trade agreement countries to conduct a fresh assessment of whether additional exports are in the public interest. While the report stopped short of calling for a complete ban on new export approvals, it suggests that increasing exports will drive up domestic prices, jack up emissions and possibly help China, conclusions that will potentially open up projects approved by the incoming Trump team to legal vulnerability, according to Bloomberg News.
“The main takeaway is that a business-as-usual approach is neither sustainable nor advisable,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told reporters on Tuesday. “American consumers and communities and our climate would pay the price.”
Trump has pledged to end the freeze on export approvals immediately upon assuming office in January 2025 as part of a wider “energy dominance” agenda, a plan to unshackle U.S. energy producers to drive down domestic prices and reinforce American economic might on the global stage. It could take the Trump administration up to a year to issue its own analysis, and Bloomberg News reported Tuesday that “findings showing additional exports cause more harm than good could make new approvals issued by Trump’s administration vulnerable to legal challenges.”
Republican Washington Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers slammed the study as “a clear attempt to cement Joe Biden’s rush-to-green agenda” in a Tuesday statement and asserted that the entire LNG pause was a political choice meant to appease hardline environmentalist interests.
Notably, S&P Global released its own analysis of the LNG market on Tuesday and found that increasing U.S. LNG exports is unlikely to have any “major impact” on domestic natural gas prices, contradicting a key assertion of the DOE’s brand new study. Members of the Biden administration were reportedly influenced by a Cornell University professor’s questionable 2023 study claiming that natural gas exports are worse for the environment than domestically-mined coal, and officials also reportedly met with a 25-year old TikTok influencer leading an online campaign against LNG exports before announcing the pause in January 2024.
“It’s time to lift the pause on new LNG export permits and restore American energy leadership around the world,” Mike Sommers, president and CEO of the American Petroleum Institute, said of the new DOE report. “After nearly a year of a politically motivated pause that has only weakened global energy security, it’s never been clearer that U.S. LNG is critical for meeting growing demand for affordable, reliable energy while supporting our allies overseas.”
Anne Bradbury, CEO of the American Exploration and Production Council, also addressed the DOE’s report in a statement, advising the public to be skeptical of Biden administration efforts to play politics with natural gas exports.
“There is strong bipartisan support for U.S. LNG exports because study after study shows that they strengthen the American economy, shore up global security, and advance collective emissions reductions goals – all while US natural gas prices remain affordable and stable from an abundant domestic supply of natural gas,” said Bradbury. “U.S. LNG exports have been a cornerstone of global energy security, providing reliable supplies to allies and reducing emissions by replacing higher-carbon fuels abroad, and it is critical that any study or policy impacting this vital sector should reflect thorough analysis and active collaboration with all stakeholders. Further attempts by this administration to politicize or distort the impact of U.S. LNG exports should be met with skepticism.”
Has the time come to make coal great again? Maybe.
“Coal is cheap and far less profitable to export than to burn domestically. so, let’s burn it here,” says Steve Milloy, a veteran observer of the energy industry who served on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) transition team for the first Trump administration. “It will provide an abundance of affordable and reliable electricity while helping coal communities thrive for the long term.”
The U.S. coal industry has been in a long decline since at least President Barack Obama’s regulatory “war on coal” initiated 15 years ago. At the same time, natural gas became more competitive with coal as a power-plant fuel when new hydrofracturing techniques lowered the price of the former.
In Pennsylvania, a state with prodigious amounts of both fuels, natural gas has all but replaced coal for electric generation. Between 2001 and 2021, gas’ share of power production rose from 2% to 52% as coal’s dropped from 57% to 12%, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Last year, Pennsylvania’s largest coal-fired power plant shut down under the pressures of regulations and economics after spending nearly $1 billion on pollution controls in the preceding decade.
Nationally, between 2013 and 2023, domestic coal production declined by more than 30% and industry employment by more than 40%.
While the first Trump administration provided somewhat of a respite from federal hostility toward fossil fuels in general and coal in particular, President Joe Biden revived Obama’s viciously negative stance on hydrocarbons while promoting weather-dependent wind and solar energy. This absurdity has wrecked livelihoods and made the power grid more prone to blackouts.
Fortunately, the second Trump administration will be exponentially more friendly toward development of fossil fuels. High on the list is increasing exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG). “[T]he next four years could prime the liquefied natural gas (LNG) markets for a golden era,” says market analyst Rystad Energy. “[T]he returning president’s expected policies are likely to accelerate U.S. LNG infrastructure expansion through deregulation and faster permitting…”
All of which is in line with Milloy’s formulation of energy policy. We should “export our gas to Europe and Asia, places that will pay six times more than it sells for in the U.S.” says Milloy, publisher of JunkScience.com and author of books on regulatory overreach, fearmongering and corruption. “Let’s reopen mothballed coal plants, build new coal plants…”
Accompanying rising expectations of easing regulatory obstacles for natural gas is hope that coal can clear daunting environmental hurdles put in place by “green” zealots.
For one thing, the obnoxiously irrational EPA rule defining carbon dioxide — a byproduct of combustion — as a pollutant is destined for the dustbin of destructive policy as common sense and honest science are reestablished among regulators.
Moreover, clean-coal technology makes the burning of the fuel, well, clean. China and India have more than 100 ultra-super critical coal-fired plants that employ high pressures and temperatures to achieve extraordinary efficiencies and minimal pollution. Yet, the United States, which originated the technology more than a decade ago, has only one such facility — the John W. Turk plant in Arkansas.
The point is the United States is underutilizing both coal and the best technology for its use. At the current rate of consumption, the nation’s 250 billion tons of recoverable coal is enough for more than 200 years.
So, if more natural gas winds up being exported as LNG at higher prices, might not coal be an economical — and logical — alternative?
Nuclear power is another possibility, but not for a while. Even with a crash development program and political will aplenty, it is likely to take decades for nuclear reactors to be deployed sufficiently to carry the bulk of the nation’s power load. Barriers range from the need to sort out competing nuclear technologies to regulatory lethargy —if not misfeasance — to financing needs in the many billions and a dearth of qualified engineers.
The last big U.S. reactors to go into operation — units 3 and 4 of Georgia Power’s Vogtle plant — took more than a decade to build and went $17 billion over budget.
“The regulatory environment is better, but it still costs too much and takes too long to get new reactors approved,” writes long-time nuclear enthusiast Robert Bryce.
Can anybody say, “Dig, baby, dig?”
Gordon Tomb is a senior advisor with the CO2 Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia, and once drove coal trucks.
