Lawmakers seek pipeline approval

— Members of both parties on Capitol Hill, including a majority of the Senate, called upon the Obama administration Wednesday to grant approval for a U.S-Canada oil pipeline that has been delayed several times.

Over the past four years, the administration has delayed a final decision on the Keystone XL pipeline, which would send Canadian oil through the United States to the Texas Gulf Coast.

On Tuesday, Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman wrote to the State Department that he would allow the project to run through his state, removing one of the obstacles to approval.

The project must receive State Department approval because it runs across the U.S.-Canada border. On Tuesday, the department said it did not know when a final decision will be made.

“We certainly don’t see it before the end of the first quarter,” said Victoria Nuland, a State Department spokesman.

Nuland said the department would study Nebraska’s environmental research on the proposed route.

“If the state had been opposed to this or unwilling to see it proceed, that would have had an effect on our process,” she said. “But given that the state has now given it a greenlight, we’re operating within that more positive parameter.”

Supporters of the project, including Arkansas’ U.S. Sen.Mark Pryor, a Democrat, and Rep. Tim Griffin, a Republican, were hopeful that Heineman’s approval would spur the Obama administration to give the project the all-clear.

“We need the president and his team to move quickly,” said Griffin. In a letter to the White House on Wednesday, Griffin expressed disappointment that the project is moving so slowly. Energy companies and environmentalists have debated the merits of the pipeline for years.

In November 2011, President Barack Obama set aside the issue until after the presidential election, announcing that no decision would be made on the pipeline for at least a year.

In doing so, Obama said, he was responding to concerns voiced by Democrats and Republicans in Nebraska who worried about the potential for environmental damage on the pipeline”s route through the state.

Environmental groups have pushed to scuttle the project. They say the extraction process in Alberta’s “tar sands” would spoil the environment, and they worried that the planned route near the Ogallala aquifer in Nebraska would put a large part of the Midwest’s water supply in danger.

The Sierra Club noted that Heineman had previously opposed the pipeline and said, “despite the governor’s change of heart, tar sands still present a climate disaster in the making.”

Pryor joined four other Senate Democrats and five Senate Republicans who held a news conference Wednesday calling for the pipeline’s completion.

Pryor said the United States and Canada have “almost” a common market. Completion of the pipeline would increase the amount of oil coming from a friendly North American source rather than from Middle Eastern suppliers. “We’re not going to buy more oil from people who hate us,” he said.

The senators included lawmakers from big oil drilling and refining states, among them Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu, a Democrat, and David Vitter, a Republican, and Texas Republicans John Cornyn and Ted Cruz.

In addition, Pryor joined 52 Senate colleagues who wrote to Obama on Wednesday to push for the project.

Pryor said he was confident that the pipeline’s developer, TransCanada, will build the pipeline. The only question, he said, is whether it will go south through the U.S., or west to Canadian ports to be sent to China.

David Delie, president of Welspun Corp. Ltd., a Little Rock-based subsidiary of a Mumbai, India company, said it has more than 400 miles of pipe in storage ready to be used in Nebraska. When the pipeline was put on hold, the company warned that it would have to lay off some of its workers. The company did lay off about 60 contract workers but has grown since then, operating at a full three shifts with about 600 workers.

Front Section, Pages 4 on 01/24/2013

Upcoming Events