Keystone XL battle in Year 6: How a pipeline grew into a political phenomenon with a life of its own – by Yadullah Hussain (National Post – September 19, 2014)

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

Friday marks the sixth year to the day TransCanada Corp. filed an application with the U.S. State Department to build the 1,897-kilometre pipeline. Since then it has become not only the most polarizing energy project in North America, but also has taken on a life of its own almost separate from the Calgary-based company that proposed the project.

“Keystone XL is a political phenomenon that has gone to a place that no company would want – it is symbolic of a lot of different things,” said Sarah Ladislaw, director and senior fellow, energy and national security program at Washington, D.C.-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies. “It is used now as a short-hand … to signal ideological divisions.”

For the industry, the controversial project is seen as an efficient access point to its key market in the Gulf Coast; for environmentalists it is a portal to climate hell. For others it is neither an access issue or environmental cause célèbre.

For Dave Domina, a lawyer and Democrat candidate for the U.S. Senate, it is about re-enforcing landowners’ rights. Mr. Domina has been making the case for landowners against the Nebraska governor’s approval of the pipeline’s route in front of the state’s Supreme Court in Lincoln, Neb.

“All of my work in this lawsuit has been focused on protecting these landowners,” Mr. Domino said in a phone interview from Lincoln. “That’s what this case is about – it is a siting and landowner’s rights issue. There is no environmental dimension to my work as a lawyer here.”

But environmental issues do loom large over the project. It has been waylaid by environmentalists’ pressure on President Obama who must make the final call on the project as it crosses an international border.

“In those six years, more than 10,000 miles of oil and natural gas pipelines have been built in the U.S. That’s enough pipe to cross the country nearly four times,” Cindy Schild, spokesperson for
 The American Petroleum Institute, a U.S. oil and gas lobby group, said at an event in Washington marking the application’s sixth anniversary.

“But for Keystone XL, what should have been a routine approval process lasting less than two years has been politicized into six years of squandered opportunity.”

After 17,000 pages of research produced by the State Department, the President decided in April to delay a final decision, citing a legal dispute in Nebraska, where the northern portion of the pipeline ends.

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