Late last year, Enbridge and Energy Transfer, the company that built and operates the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), told shareholders that they are working on a plan to begin transporting as much as 250,000 barrels per day of Alberta tar sands crude oil through the pipeline to refineries in the United States.

The conflict over DAPL had profound implications for Canada’s oil and gas industry through its role as an impetus for the formation of the CRU (formerly C-IRG) police unit and as a model for the kind of counterterrorism police tactics that would later be deployed to defend Trans Mountain and Coastal GasLink. The companies’ new plan, referred to by Enbridge as its Mainline Optimization Phase 2 project, would mark a more direct incorporation of the pipeline into the Canadian oil industry. It is part of a broader set of brownfield projects that Enbridge says could add as much as 600,000 bpd of southbound export capacity, roughly the same amount added by the Trans Mountain Expansion Project.

The Mainline Optimization project

DAPL was built in 2016 and 2017 to transport oil from the Bakken shale deposit in North Dakota to refineries in the Gulf Coast. At the time, there was no mention that it might eventually be repurposed to transport oil from Canada’s tar sands, although one analyst suggested a version of this possibility in early 2017. Today, just 10 years later, production in the Bakken is declining — it’s already five years past its peak, according to one energy journalist — and DAPL’s utilization shows this decline: it operated at just 72.5 per cent of total capacity throughout 2025.

This may be part of the reason Enbridge and Energy Transfer are seeking to integrate DAPL into Enbridge’s Mainline System, which transported about three million bpd from Alberta’s tar sands to the U.S. in 2025. As Enbridge executives explained to shareholders, Alberta’s tar sands aren’t subject to the same “depletion issues… going on in some of [the] shale plays,” a reference to the Bakken and to the Permian basin in Texas. According to Enbridge, the prospect of decline in those shale basins is creating an opening for expanded production in Alberta, which is driving their plans to expand southbound capacity.

The Mainline System is one of three major pipeline systems that connect Canadian oil production to foreign markets, alongside Keystone and Trans Mountain. It is, by far, the largest, with more than three times the capacity of the expanded Trans Mountain pipelines. The company plans to make a final investment decision on the project by mid-2026 and to begin operations in 2028.

The project may also involve upgrading DAPL to increase its capacity. DAPL can currently transport up to 750,000 bpd, but the operator, Energy Transfer, has approval to upgrade it to as much as 1.1 million bpd. In a statement, Enbridge confirmed the project timeline but declined to comment on whether upgrading DAPL’s capacity would be part of the project.

Waniya Locke, a grassroots community organizer at Standing Rock who has been involved in the fight against DAPL from the beginning, told Ricochet the prospect of more flow increases the risk of catastrophe not just for her community, but for the millions of people who live downstream in the Missouri River watershed, a position echoed by other opponents of the pipeline.

Implications for oil production in Canada

Enbridge executives told shareholders last year that they expect a “base case” 500,000 to 600,000 barrel per day expansion of production in western Canada by 2030. Not everyone agrees. Enserva, an industry association, said in its 2025-2026 State of the Industry Report that low prices are reducing investment, and they expect production to plateau in 2026, despite the fact that there is already available pipeline capacity. Enbridge’s project also stands to compete with Trans Mountain, which just greenlit a capacity upgrade project and is considering additional projects that could add 360,000 more bpd. All told, there are proposals to increase export capacity using existing pipelines by more than one million bpd.

There are also questions about Canadian oil production that arise from the illegal kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and subsequent U.S. takeover of the Venezuelan oil industry. Enbridge’s executives explicitly cited low Venezuelan output as a driver for production growth in Canada in their Q3 earnings call last year, but a lot has changed since then. With the Trump regime calling the shots — and pirating tankers at sea — Venezuelan oil exports to the U.S. tripled in January.

Venezuelan oil, which is predominantly also a heavy crude, competes with Canadian oil for space in the Gulf Coast refineries that serve as the number one destination for Canadian oil.

Export infrastructure also has a chicken and egg question. Production won’t grow unless there’s demand, which in this case means both a profitable price on the global market and access to export capacity. Investment in new export capacity might not cause production to grow, depending on the global market, but it is a necessary condition for it. If Enbridge completes its Mainline Optimization Project, it will allow tar sands production to reach nearly four million bpd, and total crude oil production to reach nearly six million, far beyond where the Canada Energy Regulator indicated oil production would peak in both its “Global Net-zero” and its more modest “Canada Net-zero” scenarios.

Cross-border integration, DAPL, and the creep of fossil fascism

The Mainline Optimization project helps illustrate how in many ways, there is no “Canadian” oil industry. There is a U.S. oil industry that operates in Canada, in the same way that it operates in Guyana, Papua New Guinea, Nigeria, and across the globe. Oil production in Canada is part of a fully integrated cross-border supply chain that is predominantly owned by U.S. companies and U.S. finance capital.

That has obvious implications for where the industry might stand on potential, more aggressive “elbows up” tactics like a restriction of exports to the U.S. And it also means that we are unfortunately vulnerable to the exact same fossil-fueled fascist creep that has seized control in the U.S. for which DAPL, according to Locke, was the canary in the coal mine.

It’s worth refreshing our memory about the fight against DAPL.

In the spring of April 2016, members of the Standing Rock reservation began to organize against DAPL’s construction, launching what would become the most significant Indigenous-led struggle over pipeline infrastructure in recent memory. It kicked off a decade of similarly confrontational conflicts across the continent, including over Keystone XL, Enbridge’s Line 3, and, in Canada, the Trans Mountain Expansion Project and the Coastal GasLink pipeline.

To move DAPL forward, Energy Transfer hired a private security contractor founded during the US occupation of Iraq to surveil and suppress the protests. The contractor, TigerSwan, worked with local, state, and federal police agencies, deploying a variety of “counterterrorism tactics,” including embedding double agents within protest camps.

Locke argues the deployment of aggressive, war-tested counterinsurgency tactics and armaments against the #NoDAPL movement played a profound role in shaping the current situation in the U.S. “Standing Rock, #NoDAPL, created this whole administration that we currently have right now” as a kind of counterrevolutionary response, pointing specifically at the ongoing actions of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.

These tactics would come to Canada almost immediately: DAPL was explicitly cited by RCMP as justification for the formation of the C-IRG police unit (now CRU). CRU was originally formed to suppress any Indigenous resistance that might crop up, but it has since been used to surveil and police Palestine solidarity marches and a wide array of other forms of political speech and action. We also know that CRU has closely collaborated with industry and private security firms, as state and federal police did during the #NoDAPL conflict. As I’ve argued before, CRU is our ICE, its scope keeps growing, and its primary mission seems to be to defend the profit margins of US-led capital in this country.

Importantly, Locke made it clear that the links between the DAPL conflict and authoritarianism in the U.S. aren’t just limited to police tactics. She pointed out that the biggest booster of oil development in the Bakken and a key supporter of DAPL’s construction was Harold Hamm, a billionaire well-known for his role in the shale oil revolution. Hamm appears to have almost single-handedly coordinated fossil fuel industry support for Trump’s 2024 campaign, organizing dinners and raising hundreds of millions of dollars.

Kelcy Warren, the CEO and largest shareholder of Energy Transfer, is also a major supporter of President Trump. Warren backed Trump’s 2016 campaign, and, once elected, Trump issued the final approval for DAPL to cross the Missouri River near the Standing Rock reservation — an approval that was later overturned in court.

Warren was also one of the top donors to Trump’s 2024 campaign and he has donated millions of dollars to Trump-aligned super PACs. The Guardian described him as “one of a handful of the most powerful oil billionaires from Texas.”

Warren once said that environmental activists should be “removed from the gene pool.”

Enbridge made the power these men hold quite clear in its shareholder call last year. DAPL had a key permit overturned in court in 2020, forcing the Army Corps of Engineers to produce an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), which it finally filed in December. The decision to approve continued operation or to require the pipeline to be shut down remains pending. When asked about it, Enbridge Executive Vice President Colin Gruending told shareholders that Enbridge is “confident that the DAPL EIS will come through in the spirit of energy security and energy dominance.”

While the fossil fuel industry can’t be held entirely responsible for the rise of Trump, it has played a key role — and it is benefitting tremendously as a result. The same players have been pursuing the same political project in Canada for years, and it would be a mistake to believe that a “Canadian” oil industry could be a partner in any kind of fight to push back against U.S. aggression and fascism.

Energy Transfer did not respond to Ricochet’s request for comment.