A portion of the Enbridge Inc. Line 5 pipeline under the Straits of Mackinac. (Photo via Bridge Michigan)

(This story was originally published by Bridge Michigan, a nonprofit and nonpartisan news organization. Visit the newsroom online: bridgemi.com.)

With limited public notice, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has placed a new option on the table for the future of the Line 5 pipeline as it prepares to make a high-profile permitting decision about the pipeline’s fate.

Rather than replacing the 4-mile stretch of Line 5 that currently rests in the open water of the Straits of Mackinac with a new span buried in a 21-foot-wide concrete tunnel beneath the lakebed, Enbridge could potentially use “horizontal directional drilling” to place the pipeline into a much narrower borehole with no tunn

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