The Keystone story: an important long read

While most landowners along the pipeline route reached negotiated agreements with the company, Thompson was one of a determined lot who did not want to allow the pipeline at any price. Some of the pipeline opponents were the fourth or fifth generation to farm the same land settled by their ancestors, the original homesteaders whose unsmiling portraits still looked down in judgment from the farmhouse walls.

The landowners had another concern that went beyond property rights: water. Much of Nebraska sits on top of the giant Ogallala Aquifer, a formation of shale and gravel that holds fresh water like a giant, underground sponge. The water table here is so high farmers can hit water when digging post-holes in the spring. Agriculture in the state depends on the water pumped up from the earth. On Thompson’s small farm, a 30-foot-deep well pumps 4,500 gallons per minute. A pinhole leak in the pipe, he worried, could contaminate his well and leave his entire land useless. TransCanada’s additional safety enhancements like additional remote-controlled shutoff valves and increased inspections didn’t persuade him. “If it’s buried on your property, that’s going to be a constant worry for the rest of your life,” says Thompson.
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As word about the pipeline spread through the state, TransCanada’s assurances about pipeline safety were no match for the alarming scenes that Nebraskans saw on their television screens in 2010. That spring, BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, leaking five million barrels of oil into the sea. Then, in July, an Enbridge pipeline, known as Line 6B, carrying the same kind of diluted bitumen from Alberta that the Keystone XL would transport, spilled 900,000 barrels into the Kalamazoo River in Michigan—the largest on-land oil spill in U.S. history.

The Enbridge spill highlighted a worrisome feature of diluted bitumen—it behaved differently from conventional oil when spilled into water. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency would later report: “In that spill, oil sands crude sank to the bottom of the Kalamazoo River, mixing with the river bottom’s sediment and organic matter, making the oil difficult to find and recover.” The Michigan cleanup would take more than three years and required the dredging of river bottom sediments because “the oil sands crude associated with the Enbridge spill will not appreciably biodegrade.”

The long-awaited environmental impact statement on the project concludes that approval or denial of the pipeline, which would carry 830,000 barrels of oil a day from Alberta to the Gulf Coast, is unlikely to prompt oil companies to change the rate of their extraction of carbon-heavy tar sands oil, a State Department official said. Either way, the tar sands oil, which produces significantly more planet-warming carbon pollution than standard methods of drilling, is coming out of the ground, the report says.

In his second term, Mr. Obama has sought to make his fight against climate change a cornerstone of his legacy. In a major speech on the environment last summer, Mr. Obama said that he would approve the pipeline only if it would not “significantly exacerbate” the problem of carbon pollution. He said the pipeline’s net effects on the climate would be “absolutely critical” to his decision.

The conclusions of the report appear to indicate that the project has passed Mr. Obama’s climate criteria.

The report released on Friday, however, is far from the final decision on the project. The State Department must next determine whether the pipeline is in the national interest. That involves taking into account both the environmental and economic impact of the project, as well as its impact on the relationship between the United States and Canada, the nation’s largest trading partner and largest source of foreign oil.

Although Secretary of State John Kerry must weigh in with a recommendation to the president on whether to approve the pipeline, it is the president who must make the ultimate decision. Nonetheless, the assignment creates a difficult situation for Mr. Kerry, who has a long record of trying to tackle climate change and hopes to make the issue a signature of his tenure at the State Department.

Mr. Kerry has repeatedly been asked about his views on the pipeline but has never publicly commented on it. He has no deadline to make the determination. A State Department official said he was preparing to “dive in” to the 11-volume environmental impact statement as a first step.

Eight other agencies with jurisdiction over elements of the project — the Departments of Defense, Justice, Interior, Commerce, Transportation, Energy and Homeland Security, and the Environmental Protection Agency — will also weigh in.