DAVID BLACKMON: Can Trump Revive The Keystone Pipeline?

In a post on his Truth Social media platform Monday night, President Donald Trump said he still wants to see the Keystone XL pipeline through to completion. Here is the full text of the president’s post:

“Our Country’s doing really well, and today, I was just thinking, that the company building the Keystone XL Pipeline that was viciously jettisoned by the incompetent Biden administration should come back to America, and get it built — NOW! I know they were treated very badly by Sleepy Joe Biden, but the Trump Administration is very different — Easy approvals, almost immediate start! If not them, perhaps another Pipeline Company. We want the Keystone XL Pipeline built!”

For those unaware, the company that spent a decade attempting to finance, obtain permits, and build the Keystone XL pipeline project is TC Energy (formerly Trans Canada), which is headquartered in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

Fraught with controversy from the beginning, Keystone XL became a true political football during the Barack Obama presidency as the anti-oil and gas lobby in the U.S. mounted a disinformation campaign to kill public support for it. The mounting of the costly disinformation campaign made the process of obtaining permits at all levels of government – state, local, and federal – far more difficult and time-consuming, needlessly running up the project’s cost in the process.

After the Obama State Department led by Secretary John Kerry refused to issue the international cross-border permit required to complete the line, Trump quickly acted to ensure its approval early in his first term in office. By the time Joe Biden assumed office in January 2021, TC Energy had invested billions of dollars – creating thousands of high-paying jobs in the process – and well over half the line was already in the ground. Still, despite the huge sunk cost and lacking an ability to cite any instance in which TC Energy stood in violation of any U.S. law or regulation, Biden took the extraordinary, indefensible step of cancelling the project with the stroke of a pen.

But can the project really be revived now? It’s an important question given that Keystone XL was designed to bring as many as 830,000 barrels of Canadian oil per day into the United States for refining and delivery to markets.

Here, it is key to note that – as I pointed out last November when then-President-elect Trump raised this topic – TC Energy is no longer the owner of the moribund project. The remnants of Keystone XL were included in a group of assets TC Energy spun off last year when it formed a new company named South Bow Energy.

Complicating matters further is the fact that, after it decided the pipeline was a lost cause back in 2021, TC Energy pulled the installed pipe out of the ground so it could be repurposed for other projects in its portfolio. Then, there’s the fact that many of the permits the company spent years trying to obtain from various levels of governments are no longer valid and would have to go through the application and approval processes again were the project to be revived.

At the federal level, the Department of Interior and FERC would govern most of the necessary permitting processes. President Trump ordered all of his departments and commissions in January to research ways the executive branch can streamline the federal processes and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum included that goal as one of his 6 top priorities in a memo to staff dated February 3.

But even if those projects are successful in speeding up permitting at the federal level, they would have no impact on such challenges at the state and local levels. Activist groups who organized the opposition to the project saw great success in holding up permitting issuances at these lower levels of government, and would no doubt revive that strategy to attack any effort to restart the pipeline.

There can be no doubt that Trump’s desire to get the pipeline built is a laudable goal from a commercial, environmental and national security standpoint. Whether it is a practical goal is another question with many factors arrayed in opposition to it.

But one thing I’ve learned long ago is to never underestimate Donald Trump’s ability to get a deal done, so no one should give up hope just yet.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.