President Donald Trump appears to have opened the door for construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, the controversial oil conduit that even its former developer doesn’t want to build.
A Biden administration executive order that revoked Trump’s March 2019 permit for the pipeline was among the directives by the newly elected president this past week. The decision appears to have put Keystone XL back in play — even if it may now be little more than symbolic.
It’s unlikely that the multibillion-dollar 1,200-mile project to build the pipeline from Canada to Nebraska would proceed anytime soon — if ever. South Bow Corp., the oil pipeline business spun off from TC Energy Corp., hasn’t indicated interest in a revival.
“We’ve moved on from Keystone XL,” South Bow’s chief executive officer, Bevin Wirzba, told Bloomberg last June.
Former President Joe Biden revoked Trump’s permit allowing Keystone to cross the US-Canada border hours after taking office in January 2021.
Since then, parts of the system — which runs through Alberta, Montana, South Dakota and Nebraska — have been dismantled.
‘Virtually all of the permits along the way have expired,” Anthony Swift, a senior director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in an interview. “So it would be starting from ground one to resuscitate the project.”
A White House spokesman didn’t comment on the matter.
Trump and other Republicans attacked Biden’s decision to kill the pipeline, blaming the move for increasing gas prices and using it to paint Democrats as anti-oil.
The pipeline’s shift in fortunes unfolded despite Trump’s insistence that the US doesn’t need Canadian crude oil.
“We don’t need their oil and gas,” Trump said Thursday in a remote presentation to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “We have more than anybody.”
The case of the Keystone pipeline underscores his zeal to revoke many Biden policies — even if the reversal was rhetorical and he didn’t yet have his own policies to replace them.
“The previous administration has embedded deeply unpopular, inflationary, illegal and radical practices within every agency and office of the federal government,” Trump said in his executive order, calling it “the first of many steps the United States federal government will take to repair our institutions and our economy.”
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