The White House said on Tuesday that it was not considering shutting down Enbridge Inc's Line 5 pipeline after Canada in 1977 invoked a 1977 treaty with the United States to start bilateral negotiations over it.
Line 5 is at the center of a long-running environmental dispute between Calgary-based Enbridge and the state of Michigan that has embroiled the Canadian and U.S. governments.
We expect that both the U.S. and Canada will engage constructively in those negotiations, White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters.
She said that those discussions shouldn't be viewed as an indicator that the U.S. government is considering shutting down the pipeline.
She said that we're not going to do something that we're not going to do.
The Line 5 pipeline ships 540,000 barrels per day of crude and refined products between Superior, Wisconsin, and Sarnia, Ontario, via Michigan, and is a key link in Enbridge's Mainline network, which exports the bulk of Canadian crude exports to the United States.
The governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, ordered Enbridge to stop operating the pipeline by May because of concerns that a section running underwater in the Mackinac straits could leak into the Great Lakes. The company ignored that order and the two sides are embroiled in a legal battle over Line 5's fate.
The Canadian government, which backed Enbridge, took issue last month by introducing a decades-old pipeline treaty with the United States to start negotiations.