Keystone pipeline

Keystone pipeline, petroleum pipeline that stretches 2,687 miles (4,324 km) across Canada and parts of the continental United States and is designed to deliver oil recovered from tar sands in Alberta, Canada, with petroleum terminals in Houston, Texas, and Patoka, Illinois, in the United States. The first phase of the Keystone Pipeline was completed by the TC Energy company (formerly TransCanada) in 2010; it extended from Hardisty, Alberta, east to southern Manitoba before turning southward to Steele City, Nebraska, and eastward again to Patoka. The second and third phases, which connected the storage facilities in Steele City south to Cushing, Oklahoma, and on to Houston, were completed in 2011 and 2014, respectively. Although the pipeline was designed to transport as much as 830,000 barrels (approximately 34.9 million gallons) of oil per day, its throughput between 2012 and 2022 largely ranged between 550,000 and 650,000 barrels (23.1 million and 27.3 million gallons) per day.

The pipeline has faced criticism from environmentalists since its inception, and its fourth phase—the Keystone XL—an expansion of the pipeline system, proposed in 2008, designed to connect Hardisty to Steele City with a larger-diameter pipe along a more direct route through the U.S. states of Montana and South Dakota, became a symbol of the ongoing dispute between environmentalists and fossil-fuel proponents over the climate, and it has yet to be constructed. Even without the pipeline’s expansion, TC Energy continues to draw scrutiny; a 12-year study conducted by the U.S. Government Accountability Office revealed that 22 leak incidents occurred between 2010 and 2020. A pipeline rupture in Washington county, Kansas, in 2022 spilled 14,000 barrels (588,000 gallons) of crude oil into a nearby water source, which forced TC Energy officials to close the pipeline for roughly 20 days.

Initial resistance to expansion

TC Energy’s announcement in 2008 of its plan to build Keystone XL (in which XL stands for “export limited”) was met with substantial resistance from environmental activists, the scientific community, and Native Americans. They argued that the pipeline posed substantial risk to the environment and that it infringed on the rights of the Indigenous people, specifically the Rosebud Sioux (Sicangu Lakota Oyate), the Nakoda, and the Gros Ventre (Aaniiih) tribes, whose lands through which the pipeline would travel, while at the same time raising concerns about possible pipeline leaks and oil spills that could contaminate the water sources on which the tribes rely. Environmental scientists and activists also focused on the fact that the feature that separates the Keystone pipeline from the other approximately 3 million miles (4.8 million km) of oil transportation systems in the United States is its use in transporting tar sand oil, a type of synthetic crude oil made by separating bitumen from the sand and clay using hot water. Although all fossil fuels contribute to climate change, petroleum refined from tar sands emits three times more greenhouse gas than any other fuel during extraction and refining, while also depleting freshwater resources and creating an abundance of hazardous byproducts, including petroleum coke.

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Keystone XL dispute

Although the U.S. State Department under U.S. Pres. Barack Obama turned down TC Energy’s request for a permit to build the pipeline extension in 2015, the Trump administration, working through an executive order, approved it in early 2017, which led to litigation. The tribes argued in 2018 in Rosebud Sioux v. Trump that the federal government had transgressed treaty rights and tribal sovereignty in granting a presidential permit to TC Energy to build the pipeline; the U.S. District Court for the District of Montana ruled in 2020 that such a permit applied only to the border area and not to the full length of the pipeline through the Indigenous people’s lands. The proposal to build the Keystone XL pipeline was discontinued in 2021, after U.S. Pres. Joe Biden signed an executive order revoking the permit, and TC Energy terminated plans for the project.

Throughout the dispute, proponents of the Keystone XL pipeline argued in favor of its construction on the basis of political and economic advantages that it would bring to the United States. They claimed that using Canada as a source of oil would eliminate political and economic dependence on Middle Eastern oil supplies and increase energy security and that an increased supply would mean, according to market principles, lower prices for consumers. They also argued that construction and maintenance of the pipeline would create more jobs, bolster existing infrastructure, and decrease the environmental impact of oil extraction from countries with lax environmental regulations (as Canada took steps to reduce its carbon footprint) and transportation. The results of studies conducted by energy experts, however, which took into account the pipeline’s capacity, design, and purpose and the reality that petroleum is traded on a global, and not a regional, market, called these points into question. They noted that even if the Keystone XL extension were completed, it would contribute less than 1 percent to world oil supplies, and the assumed downward pressure it would provide on fuel prices (and energy independence subsequently) would thus be negligible.