It’s Last Stop, South Dakota For Keystone XL Pipeline

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So… no wonder US presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton has been playing her Keystone XL Pipeline cards close to the vest. The notorious “carbon bomb” project was supposed to bring tar sands oil from Canada down through the US breadbasket states to Gulf Coast refineries for export overseas. However, after winding its way slowly through the review process, the pipeline  appears to be winding down.

TransCanada Set To Cave On Keystone XL Pipeline

The latest word on the Keystone XL Pipeline comes from The Canadian Press by way of our friends over at TheHill.com.

The August 9 article, by reporter Alexander Panetta, is packed with details explaining why TransCanada appears to be throwing in the towel, but if you don’t have time to check it out for yourself, here are some of the particulars.

According Panetta’s sources:

…the main suspense now is how Obama will make his big announcement about the pipeline: quietly, in a mid-summer Friday afternoon statement, or boldly from a platform like his upcoming Aug. 31 trip to a climate-change conference in Alaska.

For the record, we’re guessing Alaska, but maybe that’s just us.

Panetta’s sources claim that the White House has been signaling, publicly and privately, that the project is a goner, leaving TransCanada (the owner of the pipeline) to ponder its next moves.

A NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) challenge is one option under discussion, but apparently not a likely one considering that the US has never lost a NAFTA case, unless TransCanada is feeling lucky.

In that regard, according to Panetta, the US is resting on a winning streak of NAFTA cases to the tune of 13-0, so odds are that the next case will break the streak, right? Right?

The Keystone XL Pipeline Is Dead, Sez Hoven

Panetta also references some recent insider-y information divulged by North Dakota Republican Senator John Hoeven, and for that we’ll go to a closer source.

We still can’t believe we missed this piece on the Keystone XL Pipeline by a team of three Bloomberg reporters when it first came out on July 28, so our bad and now let’s catch up.

According to Bloomberg:

“What I’m hearing from multiple sources is that he is going to turn down Keystone when we’re out in August,” Hoeven told Bloomberg BNA’s Ari Natter after a speech on the Senate floor Tuesday in which he discussed the project. “I got a couple sources, and that’s what they’re saying. But I can’t tell you who.”

That’s not all. The article also turns to an analyst at National Bank Financial in Calgary, who also reads doom in the tea leaves.

The reporters also cite a Frost & Sullivan analyst who explains that another pipeline company, Enbridge (yep, this Enbridge) has been stealthily (or not) expanding its capacity for moving crude into the US from Canada.

That removes a good deal of the urgency for constructing Keystone, but it won’t give much comfort to those who would prefer to see the Canadian tar sands oil industry die off altogether.

 

Koch Brothers To The Rescue…?

There have been some pretty definitive hints that the now-familiar Koch brothers are one of the main forces driving the weirdly passionate interest of certain US legislators in promoting a project that would create laughably few permanent jobs (especially compared to other energy sectors such as wind and solar) and create enormous risks for US water resources, without benefiting US  consumers — the refined product is pledged to the export market, after all.

However, even the mighty Koch brothers are no match for three-dimensional chess. Despite throwing vast amounts of dollars into the lobbying bin, the brothers have only slowed, not stopped, the growth of solar, onshore wind energy, and offshore wind energy in the US.

The offshore wind energy case is particularly instructive. We’ve noted the Koch influence at work in several states along the wind-rich Atlantic coast, but the Obama Administration has nevertheless pushed forward with offshore wind leases.

The nation’s first offshore wind farm is finally under construction off the coast of Rhode Island, and we’re guessing that the other Atlantic Coast states will fall like dominoes once the job-creating potential of offshore wind is in full, undeniable display.

Where were we? Oh, right, the pipeline. As for the reasons why TransCanada, Hoven, and other supporters have thrown in the towel, you can start with the appointment of well known environmentalist and US Senator John Kerry to helm the Department of State, which is charged with greenlighting (or not, as the case may be) cross-border projects.

Our friends over at DeSmogBlog have also noted that new questions regarding pipeline safety were raised at permit hearings in South Dakota earlier this month, when interveners presented evidence that TransCanada had purchased pipe several years ago, and was storing it in exposed locations.

We’re also guessing that the Adminstration knew all along that nothing was going to happen if the pipeline transgressed on Native American lands established by treaty, unless the current occupants were in favor of the project, which they weren’t, and aren’t.

No, we didn’t forget about Hillary Clinton. She was asked about the Keystone XL Pipeline at a town hall in New Hampshire on July 28 and she gave an answer that can kindly be described as lame.

For that failure to communicate, Clinton was criticized in environmental circles. However, knowing what we know now, it seems just as likely that she got the inside scoop on Keystone from the White House and didn’t want to jump the gun with a definitive answer.

That could explain why she didn’t just blurt out “Who cares? By the time I take office it’ll will be toast, just like CleanTechnica said it would be two years ago.”

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Image via US Department of State