President Donald Trump’s executive actions this week give fresh hope to the Keystone XL and the Dakota Access pipelines. And that’s the way it should be.
We applaud Trump’s executive action to ease the way for the government to reconsider its review and renegotiate terms of the Keystone XL pipeline.
The pipeline, which would transport tar sands crude oil from Canada to Gulf Coast refineries in Texas, has become one of the most studied and politicized pipelines in recent U.S. history.
It was approved at numerous stages of development, at one point even by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, but former President Barack Obama waffled on it, creating new hurdles for it to scale before rejecting the proposal in 2015.
The Keystone pipeline is not the grand jobs engine as its supporters claim, but neither is it a dire threat to the environment as opponents contend. It’s a pipeline, just like the many thousands of miles of other pipelines that move crude oil and gas from one end of the United States to another.
Pipelines are safer than shipping oil on trucks, tankers and rail cars, and the economic and national security benefits in this case outweigh environmental risks.
For example, a State Department study during the Obama administration concluded carbon emissions from the Keystone pipeline would amount to less than 1 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, hardly a threat to climate change or greenhouse gas mitigation strategies. And experts say moving the crude oil by rail, truck or tanker would generate at least a 28 percent bigger greenhouse gas footprint than the pipeline.
The number of jobs created from the pipeline has always been a dubious claim, which unfortunately Trump repeated at the signing ceremony this week. Yes, jobs will be created but not the 28,000 he claimed.
The greater benefit is in maintaining jobs for U.S. refiners and suppliers and providing another source of crude closer to home. Canada plans to export its crude oil to market. Completing the pipeline gives the United States an opportunity to benefit from energy sources on this continent.
Trump also took action on the Dakota Access Pipeline, which has been in limbo since the Army Corps of Engineers halted the project in December to consider alternative routes.
Protesters from the local Standing Rock Sioux tribe and others stymied progress on the pipeline, claiming that it would pose an environmental threat to the tribe’s drinking water and would cross through its reservation.
We’ve examined those concerns and don’t find them persuasive. The route does not cross the reservation and while it does travel underneath the Missouri River, the primary drinking water source for the tribe, eight other oil and gas pipelines already safely cross the river.
Trump’s executive memo directs the Army Corps to “review and approve in an expedited manner, to the extent permitted by law” the Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners’ project.
The approximately 1,100-mile pipeline from the Dakotas to Illinois is more than 90 percent complete and deserves a timely decision on the remaining piece.
— The Dallas Morning News
