Grist: Meet Energy East: It will be 2,858-miles long, putting it right up there with some of the longest pipelines in the world. It would pump about a third more crude than Keystone XL was intended to. It`ll be bigger than the Druzhba pipeline, which carries oil 2,500 miles from Southeast Russia to the rest of Europe.
"Bigger" is the point. There`s no sense in extracting crude from Canada`s tar sands if you can`t sell it in extreme bulk, and a big part of selling it is figuring out how to get it to people....