State Department Plans to Approve Keystone Pipeline Permit
Approval expected before Monday.
According to reports, the State Department will approve the needed Keystone pipeline permit before Monday. The decision “comes 16 months after Obama blocked construction of the 1,200-mile pipeline.” From Politico:
Undersecretary for political affairs Tom Shannon plans to sign the pipeline’s cross-border permit on or before Monday, the last day for the 60-day timeline that President Donald Trump ordered in January. Secretary of State and former Exxon Mobil Chief Executive Rex Tillerson recused himself from the process.
The approval, while long expected, will hand Trump a political victory and follows his promise to quickly approve the $8 billion project that developer TransCanada has sought to build for nearly a decade.
The State Department did not confirm the report, but a spokesman told The Hill that the department “will be in compliance with the 60-day requirement” noted in a memo President Donald Trump “signed shortly after taking office.”
The department has to approve the permit since “the pipeline crosses an international pipeline.”
Of course D.C. Republicans approve of the permit, while groups who oppose it have stated they will not back down.
The pipeline began a firestorm when Obama insisted it would not lower gas costs, environmental groups blabbed about climate change, and the EPA insisted it would worsen global warming. Yet, one government report showed “that the project will do little harm to the environment.”
Obama refused to issue a permit to developer TransCanada for the pipeline, “which would carry up to 830,000 barrels of oil each day between the Alberta oil sands to existing pipelines in the United States,” in 2015.
At a rally, Trump told people that he will ask TransCanada to resubmit the application and use American made steel:
“If people want to build pipelines in the United States, they should use American steel and they should build it and create it right here,” Trump said at a Monday rally in Louisville, Ky. “That pipeline is going to be manufactured right here.”
TransCanada has said roughly half of the steel for Keystone XL will come from the U.S. That steel will come from Welspun Tubular in Arkansas, a subsidiary of India-based Welspun Group.
TransCanada will also need permission from Nebraska, which should come in September:
Bold Alliance, a group that has protested the pipeline, is now seeking local residents to file as “intervenors” in the NPSC process in an effort to block route approval, said Jane Kleeb, the group’s president and Nebraska Democrat Party chair.
In addition, the pipeline is likely to encounter delays from landowners in the state unhappy with the company’s use of eminent domain along the route, Kleeb said. TransCanada says 90 percent of landowners along the proposed route have signed voluntary easement approvals, but there are still holdouts.
“We turn to our state, Nebraska, which has been the heart of the KXL resistance for the past seven years,” Kleeb said.
The 2,147-mile pipeline would run from Alberta, Canada, to refineries in Illinois and Texas.
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Comments
One of my earliest memories of realizing I wasn’t a liberal was during the debate leading up to the construction of the Alaskan Pipeline. I was very young at the time, but even then I remember having the realization that the liberal screaming and gnashing of teeth was all a bunch of bullshit. And hypocritical. We need oil for our society to function… FOR THE CHILDREN! Developing our own (or our neighbor and ally’s) oil resources is a good idea. And pipelines are vastly safer than other forms of transportation. And oh yeah, it will be good for the economy. Yet they persist. WTF?
They hate life.
So much BS from both T-rump and Barracula…both BIG GOVERNMENT bois…over a lil’ ol’ pipeline.
Just build the damn thing, at whatever cost and using whatever materials the market shows are rational. Screw this “nationalist populist” crap, right along with the Druidic religion of the “greens”.
The southern leg from Cushing OK to TX is already done and carrying oil.
http://newsok.com/article/5535544
If most “environmentalists” (most commonly leftists using that label) were most concerned about the environment, they would support pipelines because they are much safer for people and the environment than the alternative: shipment by rail cars. People are going to use a lot of oil, at least in the near future, and it has to get shipped somehow. Pipelines are the cheapest, safest, and most environmentally friendly way of shipping crude oil and oil products. The Lac-Megantic rail disaster is the worst so far, but there have been many accidents and there will be many more.
Alberta tar sands are so thick and nasty the only refiners that can handle it are on the Texas Gulf coast.
One of the big opponents has been Geo Soros. He has been making a fortune shipping oil and coal from Canada to the US,. by rail. I wish they would EXPORT HIM. BB
The Keystone Pipeline is a 30″ pipe and has been delivering oil from Hardisty, Alberta, over 2,147 mile to the junction at Steele City, Nebraska, and on to Wood River Refinery in Roxana, Illinois, and Patoka Oil Terminal Hub (tank farm) north of Patoka, Illinois, sine June 2010 when it was completed.
What you are talking about is the proposed Keystone XL pipeline which would start from the same area in Alberta, Canada, as the Keystone 30″ pipeline. The Canadian section would consist of 327 miles of new pipeline, and would enter the United States at Morgan, Montana, and travel through Baker, Montana, where American-produced oil would be added to the pipeline; then it would travel through South Dakota and Nebraska, where it would join the existing Keystone pipeline at Steele City, Nebraska, where it connects to the Keystone-Cushing extension.
The Keystone-Cushing extension which runs 291 miles from Steele City to storage, distribution facilities, and tank farm at Cushing, Oklahoma and was completed in February 2011.
The rest of the Keystone Project is the Gulf Coast Extension extending 487 miles from Cushing to refineries at Port Arthur, Texas was completed in January 2014,
A lateral pipeline to refineries at Houston, Texas and a terminal was completed mid-2016, going online this year, 2017.