If the economy is softening, as Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke suggested last week, your best stock bets might be steady eddies with minimal downside risk, and paying higher dividends than you get from CDs.

Energy pipeline operators might fit that bill. They transport crude oil, natural gas and other petroleum products through their pipelines. They enjoy a stable and profitable business, because, in most cases, their fees are based on the volume of product transported, not on the price of oil or natural gas. Pipelines rarely duplicate one another's routes, so they have no competition.

Because the demand for petroleum products is rising, many pipeline operators are growing earnings and dividends, either by acquiring existing pipelines from third parties, building new pipelines or by increasing the capacity of existing facilities.

The pipelines that pay high dividends are usually organized as Master Limited Partnerships MLPs. Although not corporations, MLPs trade on major stock exchanges, just like stocks.

MLPs have a general partner and limited partners. The general partner manages the operation and individual investors are limited partners. The general partner receives a percentage of the profits off the top, before the limited partners get their cut.

Currently, most MLPs are paying dividends equating to 5 to 9 percent dividend yields your yield is the next 12 months expected dividends divided by the price you paid for the shares.

MLPs pay big dividends because they don't pay corporate income taxes. Instead, the income is allocated to the partners.

MLPs offer potential tax advantages because most of their distributions are classified as a return of investment instead of income. You don't pay taxes on that portion until you sell. However, when you do sell, you'll be taxed at the ordinary income rate, not as capital gains.

On the downside, MLPs require the use of special forms at tax time, which some investors consider too complicated. Also, holding MLPs in tax-sheltered accounts such as IRAs could incur penalties if you collect distributions totaling more than $1,000 annually. If that's your situation, consult a tax adviser before investing.

MLPs have their own lingo. Shares are called units and dividends are called distributions. So instead of paying dividends to shareholders, MLPs pay distributions to unit holders.

Screening is the best way to find worthwhile MLP candidates. If you're not familiar with the term, stock screeners are programs available on financial sites that you can use to search the entire market for stocks meeting your particular requirements.

MSN Money's Deluxe Screener moneycentral.msn.com and Yahoo's Basic Stock Screener are the only free screeners I know of that can search specifically for pipeline operators. Of the two, Yahoo's screener is easier to use, so I'll use it to demonstrate the process.

From the Yahoo Finance home page finance.yahoo.com, select Investing, click on stocks, and then select "Launch HTML Screener."

Once there, click on "Oil & Gas Pipelines" in the Industry Selection box to confine your search to stocks in that category. Next, specify your minimum acceptable dividend yield. I set my minimum at 5 percent because that is well above current CD rates. Try lowering it to 4 percent if you want to see more stocks.

Your best prospects are MLPs that are growing earnings, and hence dividends. Stock analysts generally forecast the next five year's average annual earnings growth rate for stocks that they cover. Yahoo lets you screen on consensus average five-year earnings growth forecasts. I selected 5 percent minimum, which is good for high dividend stocks.

Analysts usually publish buy, sell or hold ratings on stocks that they cover. Those ratings are based mostly on earnings growth expectations, not dividend safety or expected dividend growth, which would be of more value to us. Thus, I reasoned that as long as analysts aren't advising selling a stock, it's a viable candidate. I required "Hold Rating or better" for average analyst recommendation.

Yahoo listed six MLPs with dividend yields ranging from 5.8 percent to 9 percent when I ran the screen: Copano Energy 5.8 percent yield, Enbridge Energy Partners 7.4 percent, Energy Transfer Partners 9 percent, Magellan Midstream Partners 5.9 percent, Oneok Partners 6.4 percent and Sunoco Logistics Partners 6.6 percent. Disclosure: I own shares of Copano Energy and Energy Transfer Partners.

Copano is not an MLP, it's a limited liability company or LLC. As such, Copano has no master partner to take a cut off the top. All of the profits go to shareholders. However, for tax purposes, LLCs are treated the same as MLPs.

As the case for all screens, consider the results as candidates for further research, not a buy list.

You can't analyze an MLP the same as you would a regular stock. MLPs own lots of assets that result in large depreciation charges that subtract from reported earnings, but don't affect the cash flow that fuels dividends. Your best prospects are MLPs with a strong dividend growth history and plenty of pipeline construction projects underway.

You can see the dividend growth history on Yahoo by getting a price quote, clicking on Historical Prices and then selecting "Dividends Only."

You can learn about an MLP's expansion plans by reading the management summary portions of their quarterly and annual reports. You can see the SEC reports on Yahoo by selecting SEC Filings and then looking for reports labeled 10-Q quarterly and 10-K annual. Once you've found a report, select Summary to read the management's discussion.

This may sound like work, but if you pick the right MLPs, you'll probably end up holding them for years, so it's time well spent.

Harry Domash of Aptos teaches online investing and publishes the Winning Investing newsletter. Contact him at www.winninginvesting.com or Santa Cruz Sentinel, P.O. Box 638, Santa Cruz, CA 95061.