The same company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline—which was dealt a setback Sunday when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced it will not grant a key permit for the project and will instead look for an alternate route—wants to build a 162-mile pipeline that would cut through the Atchafalaya Basin and 11 Louisiana parishes, The Advertiser reports.
Environmental groups, some landowners and concerned citizens are quietly building resistance to the Bayou Bridge Pipeline project. They’re gathering thousands of signatures from as far away as New Zealand and South Africa, forcing the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to call for a public hearing where they plan to demand a thorough environmental impact assessment of the project.
Cherri Foytlin, of Rayne, is Native American and has spent time with the North Dakota pipeline protesters. She believes the Dakota movement may be inspiring people in Louisiana, where the oil and gas industry still reigns, to also demand protection for their environment.
“Enough is enough,” she says. “At what point do we draw the line and say we’re not going to be the energy sacrifice area for this nation anymore?”
Energy Transfer Partners, the company behind the DAPL, owns Bayou Bridge Pipeline LLC, the company whose name appears on the Louisiana pipeline permit applications.
Energy Transfer and Sunoco already built a pipeline from Nederland to Lake Charles. Now they want to extend it from Calcasieu Parish through Jefferson Davis, Acadia, Vermilion, Lafayette, Iberia, St. Martin, Iberville, Ascension and Assumption parishes, ending on the west bank of New Orleans near St. James.
The Bayou Bridge Pipeline would provide a connection between the North Dakota oilfields and Louisiana’s refineries and ports. The company says the pipeline will “play a role in increasing America’s energy independence” by transporting domestically produced crude oil to support the nation’s energy demands.
“The pipeline is merely a delivery system, similar to FedEx, to help fill a need that already exists to ship the crude to refiners and market. We do not own the crude in the pipeline,” Alexis Daniel, of Granado Communications Group, a public relations firm in Dallas, says in an email response to questions posed to Energy Transfer Partners.
In a permit application, company representatives say the pipeline project “is a $670 million investment directly impacting the local, regional and national labor force be creating nearly 1,500 construction jobs.”
