Biden issued an executive order revoking the critical presidential permit for Keystone XL on his first day in office. Environmentalists said the line would provide an outlet for heavy crude extracted in Alberta through particularly energy-intensive processes and burning it would exacerbate climate change. They mounted a decade-long campaign against the project, with battles fought in statehouses and federal courtrooms -- and celebrity-attended protests from the Midwest to the White House.
The fight against Keystone XL also presaged other battles over the construction of oil and gas pipelines from South Dakota to New York. Whole segments of Keystone XL, including one that crosses the U. Even without Keystone XL, two new pipelines are under construction that, once completed, will provide oil sands producers with more than enough capacity for crude exports.
In November of that year, activists reviewed the protest methods employed up to that point and concluded they needed new tactics. Bruno said they talked about protesting at refineries or lobbying industrial users such as shipping companies that might be using fuel sourced in Alberta.
The problem with targeting refineries and companies, however, was there were so many of them that altering the behaviour of one would have a limited impact. Isolating Alberta oil within a company's fuel supply was also impractical, Bruno said. But when it came to pipelines, at the time, there were only a few major cross-border projects in the works.
Bruno, a New Yorker who has worked for a number of climate NGOs, including Oil Change, Greenpeace and Corporate Ethics, was among those advocating the view that stalling just one pipeline could do disproportionate damage to the industry. He and others at the meeting identified the one pipeline project furthest from completion — Keystone XL, for which a permit application had been submitted just weeks earlier, and they zeroed in on it as their target.
But, you know, I'm a New York Mets fan. You still fight. Environmental groups had contested various aspects of oilsands expansion over the years, including previous pipeline projects and ecological impacts, such as deforestation.
What changed at the meeting, however, was the decision to co-ordinate efforts and throw all of their energy at stopping one project, said Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, a chief program officer with NRDC who attended the meeting.
Every major oil company in the world was there," she said. Eleven years later — after numerous court battles, protests along the planned route and outside the White House and several delays , including one rejected presidential permit from then-president Barack Obama — Keystone XL remains in limbo. Several other pipeline projects have been subsequently stalled in the U. An organizer of the first big Washington protest against Keystone XL, Bill McKibben, said the conflict over that pipeline created a template for future challenges.
He described the broader strategic goal this way: drag out and delay fossil-fuel projects and make them more expensive while alternative energy gets cheaper. Many had hoped that the disastrous project was finally done for in November , when the Obama administration vetoed the pipeline—acknowledging its pervasive threats to climate, ecosystems, drinking water sources, and public health.
But immediately after taking office, President Donald Trump brought the zombie project back to life, along with the legal battles against it. By the time President Biden took office in , ready to fulfill his campaign promise to revoke the cross-border permit, the dirty energy pipeline had become one of the foremost climate controversies of our time. It was expected to transport , barrels of Alberta tar sands oil per day to refineries on the Gulf Coast of Texas. These sands contain bitumen, a gooey type of petroleum that can be converted into fuel.
The proposed Keystone XL extension actually comprised two segments. The first, a southern leg, had already been completed and now runs between Cushing, Oklahoma, and Port Arthur, Texas. Opponents of this project—now called the Gulf Coast Pipeline—say that TC Energy took advantage of legal loopholes to push the pipeline through, obtaining authorization under a U. Army Corps of Engineers nationwide permit and dodging the more rigorous vetting process for individual permits, which requires public input.
The second segment was the hotly contested 1,mile northern leg—a shortcut of sorts—that would have run from Hardisty, Alberta, through Montana and South Dakota to Steele City, Nebraska. In , the U. State Department, under President Barack Obama, declined to grant the northern leg of the Keystone XL project the permit required to construct, maintain, and operate the pipeline across the U. Tar sands oil is thicker, more acidic, and more corrosive than lighter conventional crude, and this ups the likelihood that a pipeline carrying it will leak.
Indeed, one study found that between and , pipelines moving tar sands oil in Midwestern states spilled three times more per mile than the U. Less than two years before the project was finally pulled, the Keystone tar sands pipeline was temporarily shut down after a spill in North Dakota of reportedly more than , gallons in late October And the risk that Keystone XL would have spilled was heightened because of the extended time the pipe segments were left sitting outside in stockpiles.
Complicating matters, leaks can be difficult to detect. People and wildlife coming into contact with tar sands oil are exposed to toxic chemicals, and rivers and wetland environments are at particular risk from a spill.
For evidence, note the tar sands oil spill in Kalamazoo River, Michigan , a disaster that cost Enbridge more than a billion dollars in cleanup fees and took six years to settle in court. Construction on the 1,mile pipeline began last year when former President Donald Trump revived the long-delayed project after it had stalled under the Obama administration.
It would have moved up to , barrels 35 million gallons of crude daily, connecting in Nebraska to other pipelines that feed oil refineries on the U. Gulf Coast. Biden canceled it in January over longstanding concerns that burning oil sands crude would make climate change worse.
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