Militants who seized Federal Wildlife Refuge Acquited on all charges

[houser2112]

Is there a reason the pipeline has to take that route? It seems that it's a few hundred miles longer than it needs to be, just from a distance standpoint; it also crosses the Missouri River twice. It being longer makes it more expensive just to build, and increases the likelihood of a spill just because there's more pipe to fail. Crossing rivers requires bridges, which are more expensive than just pipe. The proposed route is not entirely uninhabited, and seems to include a state park and a wildlife refuge.

So, what am I missing here? NIMBY?

Yeah, I wonder why it can't go to the west and then below the reservation.

I was thinking that it would be better to go east from its starting point instead of west so it never has to cross the Missouri.

[Ziggy Stardust]

I was thinking that it would be better to go east from its starting point instead of west so it never has to cross the Missouri.

I'm very curious about that as well. I can't seem to find a straight answer about that online. Looking at Google maps, it seems east of Stanley (the origin of the pipeline) are several wildlife refuges, but other than that I can find no purely geographical reason why it would have to go west. Digging around, it seems that the first 100 miles or so are active oil gathering pipelines (with the rest of its length being purely a transmission pipeline) with 5 terminals between Stanley and Epping, ND. That region is all part of the same "Assessment Unit" (which is essentially the unit of territory used by the USGS for petroleum resource assessment), so it's possible that the orientation of the oil gathering pipeline is a function of the actual land rights for the oil gathering portion of the pipeline itself. That said, I still don't see why it wouldn't be possible to have the pipeline run the other direction, and cut east north of the bend in the Missouri.