President-elect Donald Trump will revive the Keystone XL oil pipeline project on his first day in office, three people familiar with the plan told Politico.
Reviving the project would fulfill a campaign promise and ignite Trump’s pledge to lower energy costs that fueled the Biden administration’s inflation.
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The project has a long political history. In 2015, President Barack Obama first rejected permitting for the project. Trump reversed Obama’s decision in 2017, but President Joe Biden revoked it again in 2021.
Biden’s decision caused the project’s developer to give up and no longer try to build the pipeline.
“Why does Biden go in and kill the Keystone pipeline and approve the single biggest deal that Russia’s ever made, Nord Stream 2, the biggest pipeline anywhere in the world going to Germany and all over Europe?” Trump asked during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris. “Because they’re weak and they’re ineffective.”
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Politico reported on the potential revival of the project:
Trump believes declaring the 1,200-mile Canada-to-Nebraska crude project back on the table would drive the pro-oil message he delivered in his campaign, said people involved in the transition team discussions about the idea. Trump also wants to show he can defy President Joe Biden, who reversed Trump’s initial 2017 approval of the project, which was strongly opposed by the climate movement.
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Any company building the pipeline would have to once again acquire land for the pipeline route, at least in Nebraska, said Jane Kleeb, chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party and head of Bold Alliance, a progressive group that fought against Keystone XL the first time around. That could once again raise bad feelings even among conservative landowners fearful about a private company’s use of eminent domain rights to gain access to land, Kleeb added.
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Calgary-based TC Energy no longer owns the pipeline system that the Keystone XL was intended to complement. And the portions of the pipeline that TC Energy had put in the ground in both Canada and the United States in anticipation of the cross-border permit approval have been dug up. Replacing that pipe would require any company that wants to rebuild it to again obtain local permits for the project.
Seventy-one percent of Americans favor restarting the Keystone XL pipeline, a 2022 poll found.
The idea of reviving the Keystone XL pipeline, if only for symbolic reasons, is also mentioned in The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days by Breitbart News senior editor-at-large Joel B. Pollak.
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former RNC War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.
