Dakota pipeline still moving oil despite shutdown order
BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) — The owner of the Dakota Access Pipeline continued to fill it with North Dakota crude oil on Wednesday and said it has no immediate plans to shut down the line, despite a federal judge’s order that it be stopped within 30 days for additional environmental review.
Pipeline owner Energy Transfer asked the court Wednesday to halt the order, and is seeking an expedited appeal.
“We are not shutting down the line immediately,” said Vicki Granado, who noted that the Texas-based company is still taking orders to move oil on the line in August. “We’re not saying we’re going to defy anything.”
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg on Monday ordered the pipeline shuttered for an additional environmental assessment more than three years after it began pumping oil.
“We don’t believe he has the authority to do this,” Granado said.
Boasberg has given the company 30 days to empty the pipeline while the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers fulfills his demand to conduct a more extensive environmental review than the one that allowed the pipeline to start moving oil near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. Boasberg cited the “potential harm” that the pipeline could cause before the Corps finishes its survey.
The Dakota Access pipeline was the subject of months of protests in 2016 and 2017, sometimes violent, during its construction near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation that straddles the North Dakota-South Dakota border. The tribe pressed litigation against the pipeline even after it began carrying oil from North Dakota across South Dakota and Iowa and to a shipping point in Illinois in June 2017.
The $3.8 billion, 1,172-mile (1,886 kilometer) pipeline crosses beneath the Missouri River, just north of the reservation. The tribe draws its water...
