Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Trump OKs Keystone; legal fight looms
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump reignited a bruising battle over America’s energy future that environmentalists had hoped was behind them as he announced Friday that his administration has issued a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline.
But although Trump portrayed the pipeline as a done deal now, its future remains uncertain. It faces difficult economic issues as well as a newly revived protest movement dedicated to stopping it.
The project, which would ship more than 800,000 barrels of oil daily from Canada’s tar sands to Gulf Coast refineries, was rejected by the Barack Obama administration last year after a decade of protest by climate activists, land owners and native Americans. The rejection came just before Obama signed an international agreement on global warming in Paris.
The new administration reversed that decision Friday, as Trump moved to fulfill his vow to undo the previous administration’s work on climate change and aggressively promote oil development.
“It is going to be an incredible pipeline,” Trump said, to be built with “the greatest technology known to man or women.”
At the White House session where he announced the decision, the president credited himself with reviving a project that developer TransCanada Corp.’s immense lobbying team had been unable to move forward over a period of years.
“I hope you didn’t pay your consultants anything,” Trump told TransCanada CEO Russell Girling.
Yet the future of the project remains uncertain. Keystone was conceived at a time of significantly higher oil prices. Its developers had not envisioned prices would drop and remain so low for so long.
Extracting oil from the tar sands is costly, and it remains to be seen if the project will cost out. There are also significant remaining legal hurdles for TransCanada to overcome.
Already, the White House has retreated from a demand that the builders of the pipeline use American steel — a vow Trump announced with considerable fanfare. That requirement would have raised the cost of the project substantially.
About half the steel being used to build the pipeline would be imported, much of it from India and some from a Canadian company owned by a wealthy Russian. White House officials said they exempted the project from Trump’s buy-American order because it was underway when the order was signed.
Trump appeared surprised to learn Friday that TransCanada still has work to do before it can proceed.
“The bottom line: Keystone, they are finished,” he said. “They are going to start construction when?”
Girling explained that the company has yet to secure the necessary permits in Nebraska, a process that involves multiple stakeholders and will endure for months.
“Nebraska?” Trump said. “I’ll call Nebraska. They have a great governor.”
That call may not do much for the pipeline. The decision in Nebraska rests in the hands of an independent commission, with members elected by voters. It will soon be taking testimony from dozens of stakeholders determined to stop construction.
“We will never allow an inch of this foreign steel pipeline that can pollute our water and take away our property rights and has threatened treaty rights of tribes here,” said Jane Kleeb, president of the Bold Alliance, an advocacy group started in Nebraska to fight the project.
Environmental groups say the approval, like other ambitious executive actions made by the Trump administration early in its tenure, such as the ban on travel to U.S. from residents of six predominantly Muslim nations, is legally vulnerable. The executive order to revive Keystone, which Trump issued in January, gave State Department staff only 60 days to re-review TransCanada’s application, and no public comment was taken.