It always seemed just a little too easy.

The Dakota Access Pipeline, the Bakken-to-Illinois crude conduit developed by Energy Transfer Equity (NYSE: ETE) and its affiliates, won long-term shipping commitments ahead of empty-handed rivals and got all the needed permits with few of the difficulties routinely encountered its competitors.

Energy Transfer hustled the project from drawing board to construction in what seemed like record time, securing project financing and additional investors along the way when it needed them most.

With more than half of the 1,172-mile-long pipeline already in the ground, work progressed to the route’s Missouri River crossing under a permit issued by the Army Corps of Engineers.

But a protest by residents of a nearby Sioux reservation transformed from a local story into a global cause célèbre as the summer wound down. And when the tribe, which claims the pipeline threatens its drinking water supply and sacred sites, failed to secure an injunction halting the work from a federal judge, the executive branch stepped in, suspending the Corps of Engineers permit pending further review.  

The action leaves Energy Transfer’s plans to finish the pipeline by the end of the year in serious jeopardy of delay until at least mid-2017, because no one likely to be excavating trenches of frozen sod during a North Dakota winter.

While the company waits to make its case to government officials in Washington it offered a preview to employees and the media, releasing a letter from CEO Kelcy Warren defending the project as safe and the concerns of the Sioux and their allies as unfounded.

“Nearly the entire pipeline route in North Dakota – and the entire portion the protestors are focused on – is located immediately adjacent to an existing natural gas pipeline built in 1982. The route also parallels a high voltage electric transmission line. This land has been studied, surveyed, and constructed upon — at least twice before — over the past several decades.

“Multiple archaeological studies conducted with state historic preservation offices found no sacred items along the route. State archeologists issued a ‘no significant sites affected’ determination in February on the North Dakota segment of the pipeline. If any potentially sacred objects were to be found, archaeologists, environmental inspectors, or trained construction staff are on site throughout construction to ensure their proper care and that proper notifications are made.

“Concerns about the pipeline’s impact on the local water supply are unfounded. Multiple pipelines, railways, and highways cross the Missouri River today, carrying hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil. Dakota Access was designed with tremendous safety factors and redundancies, including compliance with and exceeding all safety and environmental regulations.”

ETE’s unit price dropped 11% over the last three days, and it’s impossible to say how much of that was the pipeline delay and how much the broad market downdraft. The Alerian MLP Index was down 6% in that time, not helped any by falling oil prices and rising Treasury yields on top of the bearish equities trade.

In ETE’s case as for MLPs on the whole, the pullback doesn’t seem excessive or surprising. Heading into Friday, ETE units had rallied 368% from February’s panic lows.

The market now seems to have priced in a pipeline delay lasting weeks or perhaps months. That seems about right. The last-minute revocation of the Corps of Engineers permit based on a decision made at much higher levels of the government, for a pipeline already under construction, has left pipeline opponents in and out of the Obama administration in a dubious legal position with limited leverage.

The government’s statement Friday promised that “the Army will move expeditiously” to review its permitting decisions in this case because “everyone involved — including the pipeline company and its workers — deserves a clear and timely resolution.”

The guess here — and that’s all it is — is that a face-saving compromise will be found. The pipeline doesn’t cut through the reservation but rather skirts its northeast corner near the proposed river crossing. (This dammed section of the Missouri is also known as Lake Oahe.)

As a federal judge made clear Friday in rejecting the tribe’s request for an injunction pending a full consideration of its claims, pipeline foes remain on shaky legal ground.

The long-term fallout from growing public hostility to new energy pipelines is much bigger than this one crude pipeline, and it’s an issue we’ll address in the forthcoming issue of MLP Profits. But we fully expect Dakota Access Pipeline to be carrying Bakken oil toward the Gulf of Mexico by next summer at the latest, long after Leonardo DiCaprio and other celebrity sympathizers with the Sioux cause will have moved on.

This setback doesn’t change our investment recommendation for ETE, which remains the #1 Best Buy below $22.