Tex Hall is eager to bring a synfuels refinery and other tribal energy resources into the market. “The tribe is concerned about delays … We really want to work with our senators and kick-start the regulatory and funding process to get the new Indian energy programs under way,” Hall explained at an early October meeting with the Crow and Fort Peck tribes. At the meeting, Hall proposed the northern tribes consider a strategic formal alliance on energy and economic development. “Our tribes are rich in energy resources,” he said.
Wes Martel, a former tribal council member of the Wind River reservation, echoed his sentiments. “We’re here to support Tex’s tribal economic alliance,” he said, adding that tribes can’t depend on federal agencies.
At stake is a flagship project at Three Affiliated Tribes and, potentially, a large number of other projects in the region as tribes grapple with options from the fossil fuel or the renewable energy economy. The proposed $80 million Makoti synfuels oil refinery will be sited on the Fort Berthold Reservation, employing some 300 construction workers and providing 80 full time jobs. The tribe has approved a lease for this land, as well as 200 acres to oil companies. The draft environmental impact study was released just this past month.
Regionally, Bill Kitto, BIA superintendent at Fort Berthold, is lauding a minerals study reporting l to l.5 billion tons of coal on the reservation, with an estimated 560 tons of coal in the White Shield community alone. At the other end of the energy spectrum, Fort Berthold has some of the best wind energy potential of any location in the world, with an estimated 17,000 times more wind power available than can be used on the reservation.
Arguably one of the most powerful Indians in North America, Hall’s past leadership at the National Congress of American Indians means that the Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara tribal chairman’s choice to focus most on a conventional fossil-fuel path on energy issues sends a message. It also illustrates the complex challenges of tribal governments, and worries many of his tribal members.
The small village of White Shield has about 350 residents. Most of those who live there are Arikara, and the village is in the center of the storm on tribal energy policy. One problem is that respiratory and other health problems plague residents. “Within our reservation, we already have an extreme number of cancer illnesses and deaths and asthma,” said tribal member Jodie White, a White Shield resident and founder of the Environmental Awareness Committee.
The village is downwind from a huge coal complex located off-reservation. In total, eight coal-fired power plants ring the reservation. Nearby, the Mandan oil refinery draws up to 800 million gallons of water from the Lake Sakakawea reservoir, turning out 21.5 million barrels of oil annually. Among the facilities that ring Fort Berthold is the coal gasification plant and the Antelope Valley power plant, which were “grandfathered” in (exempt from compliance for pollution controls).
In total, the Basin Electric complex burns North Dakota lignite coal, one of the dirtiest forms of coal in the world. Indeed, Basin Electric, the leading North Dakota utility, has the dubious honor of being the largest C02-emitting utility in the country per kilowatt – in other words, leading the whole United States in greenhouse gas emissions. White and other tribal members have been opposing the new oil refinery.
Hall’s dream project?
There haven’t been any new oil refineries built in the United States for the past 30 years, for some pretty good reasons. First, the United States doesn’t have that much oil; it imports 60 percent of its fuel. Then there are the vast environmental problems with oil refineries.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency’s profiles of the refining industry, the average refinery generates more than 10,000 gallons of waste a day; and the industry in total releases and transfers more than 600 toxic chemicals, as well as generating significant toxic wastes. Among the list of chemicals are many associated with chronic illnesses, leukemia, neuro-toxicity and reproductive toxicity. In 1995, the EPA estimated that 4.5 million individuals living within 30 miles of oil refineries were exposed to benzene at concentrations that posed cancer risks 180 times higher than the acceptable risk level. Oil refineries today also emit up to 35 million pounds of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that has a global warming potential of 2l times that of carbon dioxide.
The Makoti complex is lauded as clean and for its state of the art synfuels refining technologies, but continues to deeply concern many tribal members.
The proposed Makoti oil refinery came with a consultant – Horace Pipe, a former BIA petroleum geologist. Pipe brought the refinery project with him to the BIA when he was hired in 2000 as an idea he had tried unsuccessfully to move onto other Montana reservations. Based largely on Pipe’s credentials, initial funding was secured for the project’s front-end environmental studies and the combination of Pipe, Hall and a federal energy policy bent on fossil fuels has greased the way for the refinery with one federal grant after another.
This project has given the Three Affiliated Tribes opportunity to exercise their true sovereignty to be able to bring an economic endeavor of this magnitude to their members, Hall emphasized at an EPA hearing. This project will not only have an impact on the tribes, but the state of North Dakota and, ultimately, the United States as well. As of December 2001, Hall was quoted as saying that he had heard little opposition to the refinery. “We had meetings in New Town and Parshall, and there was only one person who raised any objections,” he said. “I talked to a couple of elders and they were like, ‘Get it done.’”
‘Getting it done’ – the rock and the hard place
“Getting it done” is Terry Fredericks’ job. A tall, lanky man, sort of the “energy czar of Three Affiliated Tribes,” Fredericks and Hall both worked on the first wind turbine for the reservation – a 65-kilowatt generator that provides some power to the casino. The tribe, however, has larger dreams and immense potential. It’s just that federal financing remains by and large focused on fossil fuels, not “renewables development,” such as wind energy. Hence, instead of a 1,200-megawatt wind farm, the tribe is looking at a synfuels refinery.
Fredericks paints a picture that the tribe is really between a rock and a hard place. “I see that we are at peak oil, meaning that it’s all downhill from here,” he said, assessing the terrain of oil extraction. “We have a lot of sacred sites and we have a lot of resources. Those resources they are going to come after [the federal government and energy corporations], and they’re gonna condemn our land or take it. That is, unless we get going on this, and we have it our own way.”
After all, that’s what the federal government did to the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara peoples five decades ago: condemned their land for the Garrison Diversion Project. The creation of Lake Sakakawea cut through the heart of the people, took the best agricultural lands, flooded villages and graves and sent the reservation into an economic and social tailspin. Fredericks gets somewhat teary as he talks about the “destruction and the grief from the Garrison Project, from which we’ve never healed.”
Incidentally, a long-term drought condition caused by climate changes (thought to be brought on by those CO2 emissions) and a slow recharge of the Rocky Mountains has meant that Lake Sakakawea, and the Garrison Diversion Project in total, has been operating around 30 percent lower than capacity already.
Faced with the perception that the energy companies and government will take it from the peoples of Fort Berthold if the tribal government doesn’t do it themselves, the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara are looking at “doing it our way.” It’s the source of the fuel, however, for Pipe’s proposed Makoti refinery that draws more concerns: the Alberta tar sands, or make that tar sands from Lubicon Cree territory in Alberta, where for two decades communities have been opposing the mines.
Tar sand oil extraction is pretty much like squeezing oil from rocks – it takes five tons of sand and “overburden,” which would be earth – to squeeze out one barrel of oil. That process, involving an immense amount of water and land, is one of the single-most destructive energy processes known in the world. Adding to the presumably acceptable environmental destruction, Alberta and Saskatchewan developers are looking to enhance the ecological equation with the world’s largest nuclear reactor.
The Cree Lake nuclear development, proposed for Saskatchewan’s north, intends to take advantage of the unique geological phenomenon that exists in this region: In a remarkable set of circumstances, 50 percent of the world’s uranium supply is sitting next to 15 percent of the world’s known tar sand reserves. The area of both is about the size of Lake Superior, and is proposed as the site for a huge complex of nuclear and oil development.
“The simultaneous exploitation of the uranium and oil sands resources, with nuclear process power producing millions of barrels per day of synthetic crude oil, is an economic roadmap to sustained growth in both industries,” wrote industry analysts, lauding a “perfect storm” in the wake of a doubling of oil prices. Acknowledging that the refining process is highly energy-intensive, investors hope to build a multi-gigawatt set of Canada Deuterium Uranium reactors to fuel oil sand development, west of Key Lake, Saskatchewan, and 165 miles east of Fort McMurray, Alberta.
Make no mistake about it: The oil sands reserves of the region are immense. If the reserves are counted as recoverable barrels of oil, Canada would rank second in known world oil supplies – just after Saudi Arabia, and before Iran, Iraq and Kuwait – placing it at the center of desired allies in world oil production. Unfortunately, 175 of 179 billion barrels of oil in the counted estimate are in oil sands, so the leap from 2lst to second in world oil resources would only come at an immense ecological price. To get to the oil sands requires the removal of everything from the ecosystem, including the draining of lakes, wetlands and all vegetation.
The other choice
The Three Affiliated Tribes erected a 65-kilowatt wind turbine near their Four Bears Casino. The reality is that by using the political power Hall has, and the market economy, Three Affiliated Tribes could leverage a much larger wind project of 80 megawatts and could, for instance, leverage an ethanol refinery.
That is on the drawing board, but on a far-back burner. “We’ve got close to 200,000 acres we can till up and produce crops for ethanol,” Hall noted. In other words, a synfuels refinery could be part of the leadership for a new energy economy – moving both North Dakota and North America into a renewable fuels economy, not a Jurassic energy economy.
Minnesota leads the country in ethanol, adding $1.2 billion to the state economy in 2005, with 14 plants and 2,562 jobs. That’s using some 14 percent of the 140 million bushels of corn produced in the state, and offers farmers guaranteed prices for corn despite a drop in the price at other markets.
North Dakota has no less. Consider this: North Dakota’s 2004 corn crop yielded 131 million bushels. North Dakota has similar options.
As well, ethanol, according to the EPA, can reduce harmful exhaust emissions by more than 50 percent and smog-forming pollution by 15 percent or more. And, North Dakota ranks first in wind potential in the United States but lags behind every other wind-rich state in the country, largely because the state has been focused on continuing to mine the rest of the coal.
The Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara are at a crossroads. The path well-worn by North Dakota and energy companies is the synfuels and coal path. “Combusting in the present era,” through ethanol, offers an interesting choice. And, considering the last six months of tropical storm destruction, some would say that something is “hitting the fan.” As Bob Gough, from the Intertribal Council on Utility Policy, said: “When global climate change hits the fan, I’d like to be holding a fan.”
Winona LaDuke, an environmental activist from White Earth, Minn., was the Green Party’s vice presidential candidate in the 2000 election.