Rather than risk rejection by the President Obama, TransCanada Corp. has chosen to ask Washington to suspend its application to build the proposed Keystone XL pipeline through the United States and hope for a better reception from the next administration.
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The State Department will continue to review the project even as it considers the request from TransCanada, spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau said Tuesday.
All of the major Democratic candidates oppose it – including front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton, who oversaw the early phase of the pipeline review as Obama’s first-term secretary of state.
“Given how long it’s taken…it seems unusual to me to suggest that somehow it should be paused yet again”, Earnest said.
“With oil prices down and Canadian production growth slowed or declining as a result and combined with the fact that the Enbridge expansions have removed bottlenecks for Canadian crude movements to the U.S. Gulf Coast, there is also no compelling need for Keystone in the near to mid term”, said John Auers, executive vice president of Turner, Mason & Co. The company said a suspension of the review would be appropriate while it works to secure approval of its preferred route through Nebraska in the face of legal challenges.
Trudeau’s Liberal team was rocked in the final week of last month’s federal election after The Canadian Press revealed his campaign co-chair Dan Gagnier was advising TransCanada on how to lobby a new government on Energy East. Gagnier resigned and the Liberals went on to a stunning majority, but the incident raised the hackles of conservatives and progressives on either side of the polarized pipeline debate.
As recently as late September, the company indicated it was committed to the pipeline, writing in a blog post that “our focus remains on securing a permit to build Keystone XL”.
“The low oil price environment is allowing the crude oil logistics to catch up to supply”, he said.
“We’ve worked very hard for seven years to try to keep our head down and work our way through every twist and turn and every additional request through the regulatory process and we’re intent on continuing to do that until we get to regulatory approval”, he said.
“Secretary Kerry should reject TransCanada’s request for delay, and President Obama should immediately reject the Keystone XL pipeline once and for all”.
The pipeline would begin in Alberta and run south on a 1,700-mile course through six US states.
CREDO Activists have generated more than 4.3 million petition signatures in opposition to Keystone XL, and they have submitted 511,000 public comments to the State Department in opposition to Keystone XL.
The 1,200-mile (2,000-km) pipeline would help link Canada’s heavy oil fields to US refineries.
New pipeline capacity, oil sands expansion and climate degradation are inextricably linked for the environmental movement and McLaughlin argues Trudeau will never be able to untangle them.
Canada, which relies on the US for 97 percent of its energy exports, needs infrastructure in place to export its growing oil sands production.
“The easiest answer is that politically, they think a Republican administration would be more prone to approve such a pipeline”, said Carey King, assistant director of the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. In the event Nebraska rejected the plan, TransCanada would have to submit a new route to both Nebraska and the State Department anyway.
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However rail is roughly $US5 per barrel more costly than pipeline and takes a larger chunk out of producer profits.
