This is land that has been in my family for decades. It is prime Red River valley agriculture land. It was handed down to me by my mother and father when they passed away, and I’m intending to hand it down to my children when I pass away …. My wife and I have …told our children that we will pass this on. Of course if 225,000 barrels of oil bursts through this thing, that certainly is the end of this family legacy.
James Botsford, North Dakota landowner in Enbridge Sandpiper right of way

While the national press has kept a focus on the controversy over the Keystone XL pipeline, something is going in northern Minnesota. This has to do with the Enbridge Company, a Canadian Company who is determined to move oil from places where there is no infrastructure, and is showing its determination in some ways which Northerners may not like. That oil is destined for Superior. Lots of it headed this way. This is far more than a single Keystone pipeline, like four times as much oil.

Here’s a bit on the math and the pipelines. Between Gretna Manitoba and Clearbrook Minnesota, there are eight Enbridge Pipelines already in a l60 mile swath. Then we get down to a few less lines, but those are all being upscaled and expanded. Enbridge (also known as the North Dakota Pipeline Company and several other dba aliases ) is now proposing three pipeline expansions, Line 3, Line 67 ,Line 13 aka the Southern Lights increase(that goes the other way carrying dilutent to the tar sands, but still can leak) , and a new line called the Sandpiper. This would be an increase of over one million barrels of oil today, or, 42 million gallons of oil per day. “ Northern Minnesota is becoming the super highway for oil,” Attorney Paul Blackburn tells me. If all the lines go through, the sum total of oil traveling over northern Minnesota’s lakes and waters could be about four million barrels per day,. This is about 200 times more than the amount of oil spilled in the Kalamazoo Enbridge spill in 2010. Not surprisingly, there are a number of increasingly concerned northerners