A simple straight line between supply and demand illustrates why XL was—and is—needed, says one expert.
President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to issue a day-one executive order to restore federal approvals for the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline, similar to his January 2017 directive overturning the Obama administration’s 2015 rejection of the same project.
Trump’s first-term Keystone restoration was reversed by President Joe Biden in a January 2021 executive order, again halting development of the 1,180-mile pipeline between Alberta, Canada, and Steele City, Nebraska.
While Trump 2.0 could nullify Biden’s directive in a pen stroke on Jan. 20, 2025, he won’t be able to resurrect Keystone XL because the project no longer exists.
“My understanding is the company has pulled the steel out of the ground and shipped it elsewhere and found alternative routes to get its product to market,” said Brett Hartl, government affairs director for the Center for Biological Diversity.
“That would make it hard for Trump to approve an application that doesn’t exist,” he told The Epoch Times.
“Like most black-and-white stories, it’s a bit more complicated than that,” senior market analyst Phil Flynn with Chicago-based Price Futures Group told The Epoch Times.
But a simple straight line between supply and demand illustrates why XL was—and is—needed, he said.
“Whether or not this pipeline gets built, there will be another pipeline along the same route, just it’s not called ‘Keystone,’” Flynn said.
Toronto commodity analyst Rory Johnston, founder of CommodityContext.com, said a lot of things had changed since 2021 when “they had all the pipes in place in many places, like on-site, waiting to be installed.”
“Now it’s a zombie pipeline. What is dead can never die,” he told The Epoch Times.
Calgary-based TC Energy’s Keystone XL Pipeline 2008 proposal sought to add a 30-inch diameter line traversing 1,179 miles from Hardisty, Alberta, to Steele City, Nebraska, to its existing 3,000-mile Keystone pipeline network.
The XL pipeline would add 800,000 barrels per day (bpd) to TC Energy’s existing Keystone network, including up to 730,000 bpd of tar sand crude oil from Canada and 100,000 bpd from North Dakota’s Bakken Formation.
By John Haughey
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