A march on the White House against the Keystone XL pipeline inspired a rash of stories this weekend. A private company, TransCanada, wants to spend $7 billion of its own money on an infrastructure project that will employ thousands of Americans and bring 700,000 barrels of oil a day – 255.5 million barrels a year – into the United States. All that is needed for the project to begin is approval from the State Department.
But The Los Angeles Times reports today that President Obama will probably delay his decision on the project till after the election so as not to anger either his rich environmental lobby constituents, or his vote-producing union constituents:
Until recently, the pipeline seemed to be heading for a green light. Its union supporters tout the jobs it would create. And administration officials say the oil that would flow south from Canada’s oil sands — viscous petroleum trapped in clay and soil — would improve energy security.
But the plan has become a major issue for environmental groups, which object to running a giant pipeline above an aquifer that holds water used by large parts of the Plains states. They also say producing crude from oil sands would generate huge amounts of the gases believed to cause global warming. Environmental activists have threatened to withhold campaign donations and stop volunteering for Obama’s reelection effort.
Requiring that a new route be found to avoid the most sensitive areas, or that further steps be taken to limit greenhouse gas emissions, could help the administration out of a jam. Assessing the environmental effects of a new route, for instance, could take months.
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The permit process for the $7-billion pipeline has already taken more than three years.
And that delay has already cost TransCanada dearly. The Washington Post reports:
“The carrying costs on those are material, and we continue to incur those costs,” he said, adding that further delays beyond the end of the year could force U.S. refineries that have signed contracts with TransCanada to look at alternatives, either other sources of supply or other transport means.
What the above stories all fail to report is that the State Department has already produced two envitonmental impact statements (EIS) approving the project. But both times the Environmental Protection Agency objected to State’s conclusions.
While State nominally has final say in whether the project goes forward, in reality EPA has a functional veto over the project thanks to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). NEPA empowers any affected citizen to stop any project funded or permitted by the federal government by claiming the agency’s EIS is inadequate. An EPA opinion that an EIS was inadequate would give any litigant a slam dunk case to shut pipeline construction down.
Even if Obama orders EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to sign off on a State EIS approving the pipeline, it is vitrually guaranteed that environmental activists will sue to stop the pipeline anyway. Once it is determined that an EIS is needed it takes an average of 6.1 years for the NEPA process to finish.
Progressives may chear NEPA’s power to slow down the Keystone pipeline, but NEPA is also one of the biggest reasons why Obama has found it impossible to turn money approved for infrastrutcture spending into actual infracture spending.
