OPHEIM — Jerry Arnold stands in a patch of cleared land, his combine idling behind him. To the west, acres of freshly cut grain reveal rolling hills, and to the east, three-foot stalks of wheat pulse in the wind. Arnold’s sweat-stained baseball cap is coated with fine golden dust after a day of harvesting.
Last year’s warm, dry winter hit Arnold’s unirrigated farm hard. Record-low snowpack left moisture in short supply, stunting crops’ growth. But he could soon see some financial relief. Arnold is one of nearly 300 Montana landowners in the path of a proposed pipeline that would traverse nine counties in eastern Montana and an expanse of eastern Wyoming.
“We’re coming off of two, three bad years,” Arnold said, “and that’s going to be a good-size check.”
Wyoming-based Bridger Pipeline LLC plans to build a 650-mile pipeline to move tar sands oil — a dense mix of sand, clay, water and a molasses-like form of petroleum. The route would connect to an existing Canadian pipeline and run through Montana to an oil refinery hub and trading center in Guernsey, Wyoming. The company has said it plans to break ground within a year. This spring, President Donald Trump granted the project a presidential permit authorizing it to cross the Canadian border.
This is not the first time eastern Montana has been scoped for a tar sands pipeline. Bridger’s proposal follows a similar path to Keystone XL, which would have moved tar sands oil from Alberta through the U.S. to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico. Then-President Joe Biden terminated the project in January 2021, the day he took office.
Standing in his grain field, Arnold said he was disappointed not to be on Keystone’s path, and excited when a Bridger representative first approached him about an easement more than a year ago.
About the Images
The portrait and landscape illustrations accompanying this story, by Montana Free Press photojournalist Lauren Miller, were made using a cyanotype process that dates to 1824. The resulting images are blue, hence “cyan.” Miller bleached the images and dyed them in a black tea bath to remove the blue tint and give the images a warm feel suggesting the color of soil and connection to the land.
The process that produced these images includes numerous steps. Miller first created digital photographs of the ranchers and their land. These images were then inverted, printed on clear plastic, and placed on watercolor paper treated with cyanotype chemicals. Once set, they were exposed to UV light to print onto the paper, then cured in a water bath. After the prints dried, they were bleached with a water-and-washing-soda solution. Finally, the prints were soaked in a black tea bath for more than 24 hours.
The editorial intent informing this imagery is to evoke the essence of the land and the people who live and work on it. Portrait subjects were informed about the creative process prior to publication.
“My first thought was, I told him I’m not gonna let you come through unless you do circles out there,” Arnold said. Each length of pipe under his land means more money.
Arnold has farmed in this region, just south of the Canadian border, all his life. He’s seen droughts come and go, and expanded his operation to remain profitable in an industry that runs on razor-thin margins. In the 1980s, when a trifecta of drought, heat and grasshoppers decimated his crops, he wasn’t sure if he could afford to keep going. Then a pipeline came to town.
The Northern Border Pipeline moves gas from Canada to the American Midwest, with 105 miles running through Montana. The check Arnold got for letting that pipeline cut through his land enabled him to continue farming.
“It was the greatest thing ever,” he said.
Bridger’s proposed pipeline runs through farm and rangeland where volatile cattle markets, skyrocketing diesel prices and multiyear droughts have made a challenging industry even harder in recent years. Farmers and ranchers who own land along the route say a payment from Bridger could provide meaningful stability.
Pipeline companies often negotiate deals with individual landowners, paying them a one-time sum for an easement on their land. Landowners are also compensated for survey access or preliminary legal fees to consult a lawyer about an easement proposal.
The amount a pipeline company pays depends on the length of pipe and individual negotiations, which are often private. In 2012, some landowners reported offers of up to $38,000 from the Keystone XL Pipeline. Landowners in Nebraska who held out said they were offered tens of thousands of dollars in signing bonuses, with some reporting offers of more than $150,000.
“It almost feels like western Montana is eating off of a banquet table, and we’re down here picking up scraps. And this [pipeline] is like a pork chop falling on the floor. That’s what it is to us.”
Tammi Fladager, Daniels County commissioner
Multiple milestones must be passed before a pipeline can be built. First, the company must identify potential routes. Bridger has proposed three, with one defined as the preferred route. Next, the company must survey the route, examining topographical challenges and environmental, cultural and archaeological impacts. Bridger spokesperson Bill Salvin told Montana Free Press in October that the company has paid each of the roughly 450 landowners on the preferred route for the right and access to conduct surveys. Salvin declined to say what collective payments to landowners might add up to.
The Bureau of Land Management will then publish its own environmental review for public comment. Pending that process, Bridger has to secure state and federal compliance permits, negotiate with landowners and then pay them for easements. Only then can construction begin, Salvin said.
ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY
With President Donald Trump back in office, many landowners in eastern Montana are cautiously optimistic that a new pipeline could deliver the economic opportunities Keystone once promised. The Montana Department of Environmental Quality has held regular meetings with Bridger and county commissioners along the route.
Fifty miles of Bridger’s preferred route run through Daniels County, home to roughly 1,600 people, 11% of whom live in poverty, according to U.S. census data. County Commissioner Tammi Fladager said a project like Bridger would provide a much-needed economic boon.
“We’re kind of desperate,” Fladager said, sitting in a purple rocking chair in her living room in September. “Anybody that comes with a big check, it’s ‘Where do I sign?’ You don’t want the lottery ticket to walk out the door.”
Bridger anticipates hiring anywhere from 2,000 to 2,500 construction workers to build the pipeline, and those workers, Salvin said, would stay in temporary housing provided by the company, commonly referred to as “man camps.” Salvin said Bridger expects to create 50-100 full-time jobs in Montana to maintain the pipeline once it’s built.
Economic impacts at that scale are meaningful in rural eastern Montana. The Continental Divide separates more than just the forests from the prairie. Most of the state’s income-generating population centers, tourism destinations and growth are located in the western half of the state. It’s a different story in the east. The oil and gas industry is a major economic driver for eastern Montana, and one of the region’s primary avenues of revenue. Carter County Commissioners said existing oil and pipeline infrastructure accounts for the vast majority of the county’s property tax receipts. The pipeline’s promise to consistently fill county coffers, Fladager said, carries a lot of weight in the eastern half of the state.
“It almost feels like western Montana is eating off of a banquet table, and we’re down here picking up scraps,” Fladager said. “And this [pipeline] is like a pork chop falling on the floor. That’s what it is to us.”
Daniels County is also uniquely poised to benefit from Bridger because it doesn’t have any existing pipelines paying into county tax accounts. In 2025, neighboring Valley County collected more tax revenue from centrally assessed properties, which include everything from pipelines to power lines, than from any other real estate.
Valley County Commission Chair Paul Tweten said the community was hopeful when Keystone announced it was coming through the area. He said residents built new shops, bought new pickups and approved a $16.8 million school bond with the expectation of leveraging Keystone tax revenues.
Asked how he felt when Biden signed the executive order ending Keystone, Tweten paused. “You don’t want to know,” he said.
Bob Thielen ranches outside Plevna, about 250 miles southeast of Valley County. His land is on the pipeline’s preferred route and he supports the project.
“There’s a couple old Bridger pipelines that were put in way before I was born,” Thielen said, standing beside the county road running through his property. “I don’t even know what year. Probably in the ’50s, maybe.”
His property was also on the path of Keystone XL. Having watched Keystone’s death, Thielen said he’s skeptical about Bridger’s chances.
“I’m going to call this the annoying stages of it,” he said. “When all the negotiations are going on, and when you got all the surveyors and environmentalists, and everybody is wanting to come through your property and do all this and do all that, really before anything’s even set in stone.”
Bridger has local offices in the area, and Thielen said he trusts the company. But he has questions.
“Where’s the oil going? It’d be really nice to know,” Thielen said. “I don’t know why we have to keep sending oil out of our country when we’re in a struggle right now.”
He said he’d like to see more transparency from company and government officials about what the pipeline will carry, and whether it will help drive down gas prices.
“What is the benefit to the American people?” Thielen asked. “The counties might get a little revenue, us ranchers are going to get a little revenue, the American people are going to get absolutely zero from it if it’s just coming in and going out.”
Several landowners on the pipeline’s route told MTFP they are in the dark about what the pipeline will carry and its final destination.
While Wyoming may mark the end of the pipeline, it’s not necessarily the last stop for the crude it will carry. Bridger, in collaboration with South Bow, another energy company, next plans to build a pipeline to move tar sands crude from Guernsey, Wyoming, through Colorado and Kansas to a refinery in Cushing, Oklahoma.
Salvin said it’s impossible to say how or whether the Bridger Pipeline might impact the cost of fuel.
‘WORST CASE SCENARIOS’
The pipeline also comes with risk. If completed, it will begin carrying 550,000 barrels of Canadian crude tar sands oil per day. At full capacity, it could carry more than a million barrels daily. A spill could pose serious environmental and health hazards.
The preferred route skirts just north of the Fort Peck Reservation boundary, coming within two miles of the reservation at its nearest point. Tribal leaders have said that even though the pipeline wouldn’t cross their land, a spill could put thousands of people’s drinking water at risk.
Krystal Two Bulls, executive director of Honor the Earth, an Indigenous-led environmental advocacy organization, said plotting a pipeline’s path just beyond a reservation boundary is a “familiar tactic.”
“It’s an extremely common practice,” she said. “It’s like, ‘We’ll put the pipeline just close enough where you don’t have rights. And you can’t say that it’s on the reservation, so, legally, you don’t have the same protections or the same ability to fight it.’ But it’s close enough where it’s going to have an impact.”
Bridger’s Salvin said the company prioritized a route that does not cross reservation land because of tribal opposition.
“Their tribe has made it clear they don’t want additional pipelines,” he said. “We are of the mind that if people don’t want our pipelines, whether it’s Fort Peck Tribes or an individual landowner, we don’t want to put it there. We’d rather have someone amenable to the pipeline willing to have it cross their property.”
Sitting beside his colleagues in the Fort Peck tribal chambers on a Thursday morning in late September, Tribal Executive Board member Jestin Dupree addressed two U.S. Bureau of Land Management representatives. Because the pipeline would cross more than 50 miles of BLM land, the federal agency is a major player in the planning process.
“I want to know about worst-case scenarios,” Dupree told agency leaders.
The pipeline would run near several water systems that treat and deliver water from the Missouri River to thousands of Native and non-Native people on the reservation and in surrounding counties. It would also cross the Poplar River, a tributary of the Missouri.
What would happen, Dupree wanted to know, if it were to spill?
“We met with the BLM twice and Bridger Pipeline twice in the last year and a half, but you know, the same questions come about with no answers. It’s just a lot of lip service it seems.”
Jestin Dupree, Fort Peck Tribal Executive Board member
In 2015, a different pipeline owned by Bridger spilled at least 30,000 gallons of Bakken crude oil into the Yellowstone River. About 6,000 Glendive residents, whose water treatment plant was downstream of the spill, were directed not to consume drinking water at the time. Bridger ultimately settled a civil lawsuit with the Montana Attorney General’s Office over the spill for $2 million in 2021. According to data from the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, Bridger pipelines have spilled 12 times since 2012. In 2023, Bridger and pipeline company Belle Fourche agreed to pay a $12.5 million civil penalty under the federal Clean Water Act and pipeline safety laws following oil spills in Montana and North Dakota.
Salvin told MTFP the company has improved its safety protocols since the 2015 spill.
“We build the pipelines today better than they were built in the past,” he said. “They are designed for safety and 24/7 monitoring with multiple leak detection systems, including one that we invented using AI.”
In the same September meeting, tribal leaders asked BLM representatives if the agency’s environmental analysis will consider the lifetime emissions produced by processing and burning tar sands oil.
The refining and burning of fossil fuels releases planet-warming emissions. Refining tar sands oil generates 20% higher greenhouse emissions than the average gallon of fuel from other types of oil produced in North America. Tar sands oil requires large amounts of water and gas for heating and mining to extract bitumen, a crude oil byproduct used in road construction and roofing.
Phillip Blundell, the pipeline project lead for the BLM, cited a recent Supreme Court decision that federal agencies are not required to analyze such environmental impacts. He told tribal leaders that the BLM’s environmental analysis “will only look at emissions from construction.”
Council members also asked what an emergency response would look like in the event of a spill. They wanted to know how to document potential harm to the tribes’ natural resources and asked if there are plans to mitigate possible violence at man camps.
BLM representatives provided council members with little in the way of specifics, repeating several times that Bridger’s delay in providing logistical information about the pipeline has stalled the agency’s progress on its environmental analysis.
Dupree said he left the council meeting with more questions than answers.
“We met with the BLM twice and Bridger Pipeline twice in the last year and a half, but you know, the same questions come about with no answers,” he said. “It’s just a lot of lip service, it seems.”
Asked about plans to meet with the tribal council, Bridger spokesperson Salvin said the company is preparing technical assessments to address the tribes’ questions and plans to meet in December.
Dupree told MTFP that, as of mid-October, he was unaware of any scheduled meeting.
This story was reported in collaboration with the Northern Plains Independent as part of Montana Free Press’ 2026 Reporter Residency program, which places MTFP reporters for weeklong stints in community newsrooms throughout the state. Special thanks to Northern Plains Independent Publisher Darla Downs and editors Bill Vander Weele and James Walling for their insight and expertise. The story is produced by Montana Free Press/Mountain Journal in collaboration with Grist as part of the Report for America Local News Initiative.
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