http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/obama-administration-to-reject-keystone-pipeline/2012/01/18/gIQAPuPF8P_story.html
By Juliet Eilperin and Steven Mufson,
The Obama administration will announce this afternoon that it is rejecting a Canadian firm’s application for a permit to build and operate the Keystone XL pipeline, a massive project that would have stretched from Canada’s oil sands to refineries in Texas, according to people who have been briefed on the matter.
However the administration will allow TransCanada to reapply after it develops an alternate route around the sensitive habitat of Nebraska’s Sandhills. Deputy Secretary of State William J. Burns will make the announcement, which comes in response to a congressionally mandated deadline of Feb. 21 for action.
Industry officials and analysts said they expect TransCanada to submit a new route proposal for the Nebraska leg of the pipeline within two weeks.
TransCanada declined to comment on the matter Wednesday; the White House declined to comment on its upcoming decision Tuesday night and Wednesday morning.
The effect of the administration’s move will probably be to delay the politically sensitive pipeline decision until after the presidential election – the second time it has postponed a final determination. Environmental groups have lobbied against the project, arguing that the difficult extraction of oil sands contributed to climate change and that the pipeline itself posed leak risks. Supporters of the pipeline say it will create jobs and enhance U.S. energy security by increasing oil supplies from a friendly neighbor.
“President Obama is about to destroy tens of thousands of American jobs and sell American energy security to the Chinese,” said Brendan Buck, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) . “The President won’t stand up to his political base even to create American jobs. This is not the end of this fight.”
The pipeline, which requires a federal permit from the State Department because it crosses an international border, has been under review for more than three years. The department is required to determine whether the project is in the U.S. national interest.
In early November, the administration delayed making that determination on the pipeline on the grounds that the pipeline needed to avoid crossing sensitive terrain in Nebraska’s Sand-hills region. At the time, officials predicted the process of rerouting the pipeline and the subsequent environmental review would extend the permitting process into early 2013.
But language inserted in last month’s payroll tax extension forces President Obama to make a decision by Feb. 21.
Administration officials have said for weeks that the truncated timeline makes it difficult to complete a review of whether the pipeline is in the national interest, given the fact TransCanada has yet to outline an alternate route.
Some political observers said that the effort by Congress to pressure the president into making a quick decision might have backfired. Last week, John Engler, former Michigan governor who is now head of the Business Roundtable, said “no chief executive likes to be painted into a corner by anybody, whether another nation or a legislative body. There are a couple of ways to react and one of them is a negative way.” Engler and the Business Roundtable support the pipeline project.
On Tuesday, White House spokesman Jay Carney called it “a fallacy to suggest that the president should sign into law something when there isn’t even an alternate route identified in Nebraska and when … there was an attempt to short-circuit the review process in a way that does not allow the kind of careful consideration of all the competing criteria here that needs to be done.”
“President Obama is doing the right thing standing up to oil lobbyists and sticking up for the families who are protecting their clean water from the Keystone export pipeline,” said Jeremy Symons, senior vice president of the National Wildlife Federation, in an e-mail.
On Wednesday, Daniel J. Weiss, who directs climate strategy for the liberal think tank Center for American Progress, said Obama’s decision to turn down the Keystone XL permit makes sense.
“The Republican provision to force a decision in sixty days for a route that hasn’t been chosen yet is asking the President to write a blank check to a big foreign oil company regardless of the harm to Americans,” Weiss wrote in an e-mail. “Denial of the Keystone XL permit would mean that President Obama will protect Americans by ensuring that the pipeline construction and operation will not pollute our air and water. This approach is like having medical tests before deciding on surgery.”
Even Stephen Brown, vice president for federal government affairs for the oil refiner Tesoro Cos., wrote in an e-mail that he was not surprised by the move.
“Today’s decision will be a fairly easy one for the White House to make,” Brown wrote. “No one who was planning on voting against the President would have been won over simply because of the approval of Keystone.”
Special thanks to Richard Charter