$8bn Keystone XL pipeline hits another setback

Bloomberg

TransCanada Corp’s $8 billion Keystone XL pipeline may face another eight months of delay after a court ruling raised issues with a four-year-old environmental review.
A Montana federal judge found that the 2014 environmental assessment by the Obama administration fell short. President Donald Trump used that review in a March 2017 decision allowing the project to proceed. Now, the government must consider oil prices, greenhouse-gas emissions and formulate a new spill-response strategy before allowing the pipeline to move forward, US District Judge Brian Morris wrote in a ruling. Trump called the court’s decision “a disgrace” and signalled that it would be appealed. “I guess they’ll end up going to the Ninth Circuit, as usual,” he told reporters. “We’re slowly putting new judges in the Ninth Circuit. Everything goes to the Ninth Circuit. Everything.”
TransCanada first proposed the 1,179-mile (1,897-kilometer) pipeline expansion in 2008. Designed to haul crude from Canada’s oil sands to refiners on the US Gulf Coast, Keystone XL became a focal point for environmental opposition to fossil fuels. The conduit would help alleviate bottlenecks that have driven oil prices in Western Canada to as much as $50 a barrel below the US benchmark.
TransCanada said it’s reviewing the ruling and that it remains “committed to building this important energy infrastructure project.”
Adding greenhouse-gas impacts and other aspects of Morris’s ruling to the government review probably will add at least eight months to the project’s timeline, Tudor Pickering Holt & Co. analyst Matthew Taylor said by telephone. “This is the world’s longest tug of war, with Western Canadian oil prices as the rope,” Wood Mackenzie analyst Zachary Rogers said in a note.