Enbridge's Great Lakes to Gulf Coast series (Part 3)
John Peterson knows the lay of the land better than most.
And he’s glad that Enbridge is in his field of vision, so to speak.
Peterson co-owns Northwestern Surveying and Engineering in Bemidji, Minnesota, land of the mythical Paul Bunyan and his blue ox named Babe. A certified veteran-owned business founded in 1997, Northwestern started doing contractor work for Enbridge in 2007, with the construction of Enbridge’s Alberta Clipper pipeline – now known as Line 67 – along our U.S. mainline system’s right-of-way.
Northwestern has 18 employees, with 85 to 90 per cent of its work coming from Enbridge – including parcel-based land surveying, integrity dig work, and civil engineering projects in parts of three U.S. states. And Peterson says his company is hardly the only beneficiary from Enbridge’s presence in the region.
“Enbridge did a huge favor for anyone who lives along the (proposed) Sandpiper pipeline right-of-way. Enbridge went to a great expense to perpetuate and restore the original government survey boundary lines,” says Peterson. “Part of the work we did for Enbridge along the Sandpiper route was subdividing every section and quarter-section the pipeline will go through, and recovering and certifying the public land corners.
“All of those counties should appreciate the effort made by Enbridge. And it’s a massive benefit to those landowners, too,” he adds. “If people want to know, ‘Where’s my 40 (acres)? I need to have my hunting land marked out,’ it could have cost them anywhere from $6,000 to $10,000 – but because of the work Enbridge paid for, the price would be reduced to just a few hundred dollars.”
Together, the recent opening of Enbridge’s $2.8-billion Flanagan South pipeline and the twinning of the Seaway Pipeline represent North America’s first large-volume, full-path solution for safely and reliably delivering Western Canadian crude to the heavy-oil-hungry refining market in the Houston area.
At the same time, we’re also moving ahead with expansion projects in the Upper Midwest, as we continue to build out much-needed pipeline infrastructure across the continent. All told, we’re making a $5-billion investment in new or improved pipeline systems in the state of Minnesota – including Sandpiper, the Line 3 Replacement Project, and the Line 67 Upgrade Project.
Peterson, who co-owns Northwestern Surveying with Mike Stang, says the company’s team has filed more than 850 certificates of corner location in North Dakota and Minnesota for the Sandpiper project – and another 700 in Minnesota and Wisconsin for the L3R project.
Not the first time, he notes, that Enbridge has provided some regional economic stimulus, which goes hand-in-glove with community investment projects in places like Deer River, Aitkin County, Leech Lake, and Bemidji itself.
“The Alberta Clipper came through, shortly after the economic recession started in the fall of ’08. In my view, the areas that were lucky enough to have an Enbridge right-of-way truly benefited from those economic spinoffs – the stores, the restaurants, the hotels,” says Peterson.
“And it continues to this day. I don’t think there’d be a café in Viking if there wasn’t an Enbridge pump station there.”
