Obama holds his ground on pipeline

The following editorial appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Monday, Jan. 23:

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(MCT) — The Obama administration last week denied an oil company’s application to expand an existing pipeline network between the United States and Canada.

It was the right decision for many reasons, although President Barack Obama’s statement tied it solely to a legislative stunt pulled last month by congressional Republicans.

During political maneuvering over extending payroll tax reductions and unemployment benefits, Republicans inserted a clause setting a February deadline for a decision on the controversial cross-border Keystone XL pipeline.

The State Department, however, already had said it would take until 2013 to complete its review of the controversial application. The Republicans’ rushed timetable, the president said on Wednesday, doomed the project.

TransCanada, the Calgary-based company that applied for the expansion permit, has indicated that it will file a new application. In the meantime, here are some points to bear in mind:

—Heavy, hot, corrosive crude oil from tar sands deposits in northern Alberta already is slogging from Canada to the United States in TransCanada’s existing 1,600-mile pipeline system, sometimes called Keystone 1. It crosses three Canadian provinces and seven U.S. states, including Missouri and Illinois, generating considerable activity at ConocoPhillips’ Wood River Refinery at Roxana and an oil storage facility at Patoka, in Marion County, Ill.

Another operational spur of Keystone 1 drops down to Cushing, Okla., a major choke-point for oil pipelines. Mr. Obama’s statement acknowledged the need to develop additional pipeline capacity between Cushing and oil refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast. Such an extension would not require a federal construction permit because it would not cross an international border.

—Aspects of the State Department’s earlier, incomplete review of the Keystone XL expansion proposal were tainted. For example, emails released as a result of Freedom of Information Act requests documented numerous questionable contacts between government officials and a TransCanada lobbyist who had worked on the 2008 presidential campaign of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The whiff of conflict of interest also had attached itself to the proposal’s environmental impact statements, which the Environmental Protection Agency had found seriously deficient. Those documents were prepared for TransCanada, with State Department clearance, by a company with which it has a long-standing financial relationship.