One of President Trump’s first official acts was the signing of executive orders approving the Keystone XL Pipeline. The State Department sign-off is one of the last regulatory requirements needed before the work begins.
The Trump administration will approve the Keystone XL oil pipeline by Monday, reversing one of former President Barack Obama’s most politically charged environmental decisions, according to two sources with knowledge of the plan.
The move by the State Department comes 16 months after Obama blocked construction of the 1,200-mile pipeline, which would ship crude from Canada’s western oil-sands region to refineries on the Gulf Coast. The pipeline became the subject of major lobbying efforts by both oil industry supporters and environmental groups, which turned the project into the focus of their climate change campaigns.
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.
Keystone XL has become as much a political totem as an infrastructure project. Republicans and oil industry backers have touted its economic benefits and the thousands of construction jobs it would create, while environmentalists warned the oil artery could pose huge spill risks and would stoke development in Alberta’s oil sands region, unleashing a vast amount of the carbon dioxide that scientists say is causing climate change.