Oil Giant Enbridge to Purchase Gas Behemoth Spectra #OilGiants

Canadian oil company Enbridge announced an agreement to purchase American gas company Spectra Energy for $28 billion.

Enbridge operates about 33,000 miles of oil and gas pipelines and 79 liquid terminals in both the U.S. and Canada. The company announced defeat of its formerly proposed fracked oil pipeline Sandpiper last week, but Enbridge recently bought into the widely-protested Dakota Access Pipeline. In 2010, a pipeline owned and operated by Enbridge spilled more than a million gallons of tar sands crude into the Talmadge Creek near Marshall, Michigan, resulting in what is the largest inland oil spill in U.S. history. The creek is a tributary of the Kalamazoo River, and the spill resulted in oil spreading downstream for 38 miles, stopping just short of Lake Michigan. Between 1999 and 2010, Enbridge reported 804 spills of hydrocarbons across all its operations.

Spectra, which primarily works with gas, operates about 88,000 miles of pipelines and has storage capacity of 300bn cubic feet. Spectra also has a history of disasters. In Little Rock, Arkansas last year, the company’s Texas Eastern pipeline ruptured, releasing 3.9 million cubic feet of gas, and then just this past April, that very same pipeline network exploded in Salem Township, Pennsylvania injuring one.

According to Enbridge’s spokesperson, the merged company will have $20 billion of fossil fuel infrastructure projects under construction and another $37 billion under development.

In response, Director of Sierra Club Beyond Dirty Fuels campaign Lena Moffitt released the following statement:

“Today’s deal creates one of the largest and most reckless corporate polluting giants we’ve ever seen. The only thing these companies have proven they are capable of doing is putting our clean air, our clean water, and our climate at risk.”