Line 5: The issue that keeps giving … but likely not much longer

For the past 10 years, environmentalists have made a pair of now-73-year-old light crude pipelines resting on the bottom of the Mackinac Straits an organizing rallying cry.

What if these pipes puncture? What if hundreds of thousands of gallons of petroleum leak into the connection point of Lake Huron and Lake Michigan? Think of the devastation. Imagine oil-soaked fish and oil-covered birds slowly dying on the oil-covered sands of our once pristine sands.

Use your imagination. It would be awful. 

Adding fuel to all of this is that the corporation that owns these lines, Enbridge Inc., had this happen before in the Kalamazoo River back in the Granholm years.

The company struggled to respond to Line 5 as a powerful political tool at first. It took them about a year of getting publicly beaten up to formulate a plan.

They worked with then-Gov. Rick Snyder in his last months in office to create a public body that would allow Enbridge to dig a tunnel under the Mackinac Straits. Line 5 would carry light crude under the lake bed. The pipeline would no longer deteriorate from corrosive waters or catch a wayward anchor.

The pipes would be in a temperature-controlled tunnel several feet under the earth. Oh, and if another utility wanted to put its electricity line or broadband wire in the tunnel, Enbridge is willing to talk.

Enbridge’s original estimate of when they believed they could complete this huge piece of infrastructure? 

By the end of 2024.

We’re now in 2025. Enbridge hasn’t dug one scoop of dirt yet.

The environmental community has successfully slowed progress to a crawl with lawsuits and feet-dragging from the Biden administration, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Attorney General Dana Nessel.

Their stated goal has been to convince the courts that Line 5 needs to be shut down at St. Ignace, creating a dead end to the pipeline. Even a tunnel could create an environmental hazard, they claim.

This week the Department of Environmental, Great Lakes and Energy is ending its comment period on whether to renew permits for the tunnel drilling project.

The environmentalists are arguing that the earth beneath the Mackinac Straits is too unstable to dig a tunnel. They have experts telling them there may be a methane pocket down there. 

If somebody’s drill hits one of those pockets . . . KABOOM. 

Workers likely would lose their lives. We’d likely have a tunnel collapse. It could possibly disrupt the aged Line 5 pipeline. The pipeline could crack. We could get a spill. 

We could get that apocalyptic oil slick we pictured in our heads at the beginning of this column.

Based on information from Geno Alessandrini Sr. with the Michigan Laborers, the people who would be digging this tunnel, the explosion risk is on the order of one in every 169 million years. 

Not exactly likely odds. Certainly not likely enough to stop the line from being built. If state regulators were fine with approving the needed permits in 2021, it’s hard to imagine that they won’t renew them. 

Fighting Line 5 has kept the environmental community energized for the last 10 years, but this is a fait de complete. 

The tunnel is getting built. New pipelines will be built in this utility tunnel, and that will be that.

As much as you don’t want tar sands oil from Canada pouring through Michigan, society still needs the refined petroleum to power our cars and heat our homes. When we don’t need it anymore, we won’t need the pipeline.

Clean Water Action, the Sierra Club and the like will need to come up with another issue to keep folks fired up. Trump is keeping a coal-fired plant open in Holland for no apparent reason. Data centers are energy-sucking monstrosities that gobble up amazing amounts of water. 

They may not capture the imagination like oil-covered ducks by the Mackinac Bridge, but maybe someone can come up with another issue that will.

Because the campaign on closing Line 5 is running out of gas.

(Kyle Melinn is editor of the Capitol news service MIRS. His email is melinnky@gmail.com.)