But our correspondent says Pakistan acknowledges that the pipeline route through the troubled province of Balochistan presents significant security challenges.
Opposition to the pipeline began to rally among radical environmental groups long before any of them had the first clue about the pipeline route.
The real goal of these groups was not to protect water along the pipeline route, but to make it impossible to develop new sources of oil in Canada.
When significant concerns were raised about the pipeline route, not least by the Republican governor of Nebraska, a decision was made to seek an alternate route -- one that did not run through territory over the aquifer there in Nebraska.
The delay in the review was a result of concerns in Nebraska about the route by which the pipeline was meant to take -- the route the pipeline was meant to take through Nebraska and how it would affect the aquifer there -- concerns that were expressed by a number of stakeholders there, including the Republican governor of Nebraska.
The state's Republican governor, Dave Heineman, has written to Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, asking her to refuse the necessary permit unless TransCanada modifies the pipeline's route.
"If we find a mine, we inform the national authority, and we would re-route the pipeline, " he explains, adding that the real challenge is the length of the pipeline, the shallow nature of the Baltic Sea and the irregular seabed.
But in May, TransCanada, the Canadian company trying to build the pipeline, proposed a new route.
Kazakhstan's president, Nursultan Nazarbaev, told Elizabeth Jones, America's envoy to the Caspian, last week that the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline would provide an export route for early oil from Kashagan, where production is due to start in 2005.
For months pipeline executives placed bids on every route, talking over their progress each week.
The previous route of the Keystone pipeline would have crossed the U.S. border in Montana, shortcutting an existing pipe that enters the United States in North Dakota.
One important new route is the Nabucco pipeline which aims to connect Europe with gasfields in the Middle East, Caucasus and Central Asia via the Balkans and Turkey.
Although the most prevalent environmental debate centered on potential pipeline leaks that might endanger the sensitive Ogallala aquifer area in Nebraska and other states along the route, it is clear that a primary opposition goal for many is not to simply to reroute the pipeline, but rather to discourage and handicap oil use altogether.
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The Turkish route relies on the long-planned Nabucco pipeline, which is making very slow progress towards construction.
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Seventy-five miles from Bina Bawi runs Iraq's biggest export route, the Kirkuk-to-Ceyhan pipeline.
But America, determined to bypass Iran, is encouraging Turkey to consider a costlier, roundabout route: Turkmen gas would be carried by pipeline under the Caspian, through Azerbaijan and thence to Turkey.
In the past, many observers thought a pipeline between Baku and Supsa in Georgia could provide the optimal route for exports from offshore Azerbaijan.
In some places, bulldozers are still at work, burying a second parallel pipeline that will eventually pump Azeri natural gas along the same route to neighboring Turkey.
One of the things that delayed or postponed this process had to do with the opposition of the Nebraska Governor and others in that state to the route that Keystone was proposed to take, the pipeline was proposed to take.
The White House stalled the pipeline project in 2011 amid concerns it would damage the environment along the route.
The hope in Ankara is that the new gas pipeline which will emerge from the Shah Deniz deal could follow the same route and help reduce the cost of both projects.
The company operates the Trans Mountain pipeline that runs between Edmonton and the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby and is proposing expansion of that route as an alternative to Gateway.
An alternative route, favoured by many, would be a 3, 000km (2, 000-mile) pipeline to China.
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