The Keystone XL extension actually comprises two segments. But Keystone XL wouldn’t be your average pipeline, and tar sand oil isn’t your average crude. Some 3 million miles of oil and gas pipelines already run through our country. To be precise, it would transport 830,000 barrels of Alberta tar sands oil per day to refineries on the Gulf Coast of Texas. An expansion of the company’s existing Keystone Pipeline System, which has been operating since 2010 (and is already sending Canadian tar sands crude from Alberta to various processing hubs in the middle of the United States), it would dramatically increase capacity to process the 168 billion barrels of crude oil locked up under Canada’s boreal forest. The Keystone XL pipeline extension, proposed by energy infrastructure company TC Energy (formerly TransCanada) in 2008, was designed to transport the planet’s dirtiest fossil fuel to market-fast. Here’s an overview of the tar sands export pipeline that’s become one of the foremost climate controversies of our time. (NRDC and other groups have already won two lawsuits against the Trump administration over these approvals and reviews and recently sued for a third time.)Īs President-elect Joe Biden prepares to enter the White House, he has signaled that cancelling Keystone XL’s permit will be a top priority. Since then, President Trump has personally issued the pipeline’s developer its long-sought cross-border permit, and his administration has attempted to grant additional permits for the project-all based on faulty environmental reviews. But immediately after taking office, President Trump reversed course and signed an executive order to advance Keystone XL (as well as the Dakota Access Pipeline). Many had hoped that the disastrous project was finally done for in November 2015, when the Obama administration vetoed the pipeline-acknowledging its pervasive threats to climate, ecosystems, drinking water sources, and public health, and advancing a national commitment to decreasing our reliance on dirty energy. From the time it was proposed in 2008, through more than 10 years of dogged citizen protest and various conflicting legislative and executive orders by the federal government, the path for this controversial oil pipeline has never been smooth. If ever there was an environmental battle exemplifying a game of ping pong, it would be the stop-start story of the Keystone XL pipeline, also known as KXL.
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