Oil could be flowing through the $3.8 billion Dakota Access Pipeline in less than two weeks, according to court documents filed by the developer just before police and soldiers started clearing a protest camp in North Dakota where protesters had gathered for the better part of a year.
As The Associated Press reports, Energy Transfer Partners has finished drilling under Lake Oahe and will soon be laying pipe under the Missouri River reservoir, the Dallas-based company says.
“Dakota Access estimates and targets that the pipeline will be complete and ready to flow oil anywhere between the week of March 6, 2017, and April 1, 2017,” company attorney William Scherman says in the documents filed in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday.
The work under the Missouri River reservoir is the last stretch of the 1,200-mile pipeline that will move oil from North Dakota through South Dakota and Iowa to a shipping point in Illinois. Energy Transfer Partners received permission for the lake work last month from the pro-energy Trump administration, though American Indian tribes continue fighting the project in court.
The company wants to build a 162-mile Bayou Bridge pipeline in Louisiana that will stretch across 11 parishes from Lake Charles through the Atchafalaya Basin to St. James Parish. Environmentalists, landowners and others have organized in opposed the pipeline’s construction.
