Blog: Keystone XL, five years and still waiting

Today marks five years from when TransCanada filed its original application in the United States to build the Keystone XL Pipeline. Back in 2008, we had just received a Presidential Permit for our original Keystone Pipeline after a standard regulatory approval process that lasted 21 months. We were able to move forward with putting 9,000 Americans to work building the pipeline that began service in July 2010 and has now safely delivered nearly 500 million barrels of oil from Canada to refineries in the U.S. Midwest.

If it had followed the same regulatory process, Keystone XL would now be up and running, supplying America’s largest refineries on the Gulf Coast with a secure supply of lower-cost oil from producers in Western Canada and the U.S. Bakken region. More than 9,000 skilled Americans would have been employed over two years of construction, helping the U.S. recover from a devastating recession by injecting $5 billion in private-sector investment into the economy. Communities along the pipeline route would now be seeing millions of dollars in additional tax revenues injected into their budgets.

Instead, political debate is what people have watched break out — on what must now be the most thoroughly studied and publicly discussed pipeline in American history. Misinformation continues to delay one of North America’s largest “shovel ready” construction projects that will help modernize America’s energy infrastructure and provide the safest and most efficient method of moving up to 830,000 barrels of crude oil per day to the Gulf Coast.

“For me, the most disappointing thing about the delay and politicization of Keystone XL is not the impact it is having on TransCanada, but the fact that the U.S. and Canada have not been able to realize the benefits of jobs, enhanced energy security and increased trade between our two nations that is in all of our best interests,” says Alex Pourbaix, TransCanada’s president of energy and oil pipelines. "The result has been a rise in other methods of transporting crude oil that are not as efficient or safe as pipelines; and U.S. refineries continuing their reliance on crude oil from places like Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and Russia that do not share our values, our commitment to protecting the environment, or our highly integrated economy.”
 

Read more about the five-year anniversary of the Keystone XL project on TransCanada's blog