Energy

Audio Recording Allegedly Has DAPL Head Saying ‘Election Changes Everything’

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Chris White Tech Reporter
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An audio recording posted online Wednesday has an executive with the company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) allegedly saying “election night changes everything.”

Shaun King, a social activist writer, tweeted what appears to be a recording of Energy Transfer Partners’ (ETP) COO suggesting that President-elect Donald Trump’s Election Day victory probably saved the multi-billion dollar DAPL.

King’s source explains in the audio clip, which was posted using SoundCloud, that he was “in a corporate meeting at Energy Transfer Partners” and said that the person speaking was Matthew Ramsey, the company’s COO.

The Daily Caller News Foundation has been unable to verify the authenticity of the recording, and ETP has not responded to requests for verification.

“I’ve got to tell you, election night changed everything,” Ramsey allegedly said in the 10-minute clip. “We now are going into a transition where we are going to have a new President of the United States who gets it. He understands what we’re doing here and we fully expect that as soon as he gets inaugurated his team is going to move to get the final approvals done and we’ll begin to put [Dakota Access] across Lake Oahe.”

AUDIO:

Trump dumped between $500,000 and $1 million into ETP before running for president, according to financial disclosure forms he filed in 2015. The form also indicates the president-elect shoveled another $500,000 in Phillips 66, which will have a 25 percent ownership in DAPL once complete.

His spokeswoman announced in November that Trump has since sold his interests in DAPL without giving evidence to support her assertion.

The company’s CEO, Kelcy Warren, in turn, plowed more than $100,000 into efforts to elect Trump since he garnered the Republican presidential nomination. Warren gave another $66,000 to the Republican National Committee.

Warren has since cheered the election’s outcome, telling reporters shortly after the election that it’s nice “having a government that actually backs up what they say that we’re going to support infrastructure.”

The previously approved easement was rejected by the Army Corps of Engineers Dec. 4, citing the need to include the Standing Rock Sioux tribe in the approval process.

The Army Corps’s approval would have allowed DAPL to continue under Lake Oahe in North Dakota, where the Standing Rock and activists have gathered to protest a pipeline they think risks poisoning the tribe’s water supply.

The $3.8 billion DAPL is losing $20 million every day the project is delayed, one of the attorneys representing the company told District Court for the District of Columbia’s Judge James Boasberg Dec. 9.

The recording also allegedly has Ramsey talking about the political battle over the nearly 1,200-mile line, which, once completed, is slated to shuttle more than 500,000 barrels of oil from North Dakota to Illinois.

“This has been quite a fight here on [Dakota Access],” the ETP executive supposedly said. “So, let me just tell you, make no mistake about it, this pipeline is going through. It’s going through exactly where we have planned.”

Some of the pipeline’s fiercest opponents have been anti-fossil fuel activists like Bill McKibben, who has spent the last several months urging his cohorts to join the crusade against the DAPL.

The prominent environmentalist and academic took to The New York Times to rally his followers. Those constructing the pipeline, McKibben wrote in The NYT in November, have “pushed the local authorities to remove protesters from land where construction has already desecrated indigenous burial sites.”

Ramsey appeared to address in the recording concerns expressed by McKibben, as well as some of his fellow activists in the “keep it in the ground” movement.

“These are people that are pushing to keep all fossil fuels in the ground, at every angle,” he said. “This is an event that they are using to raise lots and lots of money. If they can create a cause and they can create a lot of publicity, which they’ve clearly done here, it’s an avenue for them to raise money.”

Still, other activists are working overtime to tie an effort to thwart a natural gas project in Ohio to the current fight against the DAPL.

The Stop Fracking Ohio Facebook page sent out a clarion call to the movement’s faithful in November, calling on its anti-DAPL followers and “Native-American tribes” to descend on Wayne National Forest in December.

The DAPL is working its way through the court system.

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