North Dakota’s Pipe Dreams Are the Key to Its Future

By Dec. 1, construction of the 1,172-mile Dakota Access Pipeline will be all but finished. The only thing left to build, says its owner, Energy Transfer Partners, will be about 1,100 feet of pipe to be laid beneath Lake Oahe, a sliver of water south of Bismark, N.D. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is reviewing the easement application by Energy Transfer, which spent much of the past two years quietly laying miles of pipe in four states before running into a national protest movement camped out near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.

To the protesters, stopping the pipeline is an assertion of American Indian rights and a means of ensuring that an oil spill never threatens aquifers. There are also economic and environmental stakes that reach beyond Standing Rock. Without the Dakota Access Pipeline, North Dakota’s abundant but hard-to-reach oil resources likely won’t be fully developed, potentially leaving millions of barrels in the ground.