Keystone XL back in the spotlight after Obama re-election

WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama’s re-election of President Barack Obama has put TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline back on the radar in the US, particularly now that climate change is once again a hot topic of discussion in the aftermath of mega-storm Sandy.

The oil industry is optimistic that Obama will now approve the US$7 billion project he stalled in January, deferring a decision until after the presidential election.

While the president said America has an obligation to future generations to address climate change, he acknowledged it’s not a priority and added there’s no consensus on how to tackle it.

“The American people right now have been so focused, and will continue to be focused, on our economy and jobs and growth that, you know, if the message is somehow we’re going to ignore jobs and growth simply to address climate change, I don’t think anybody’s going to go for that,” he said in his first press conference since being re-elected last week.

“I won’t go for that.”

He didn’t comment specifically on Keystone during his remarks.

TransCanada officials, meantime, expressed confidence that the pipeline will soon get the green light.

“We continue to believe that Keystone XL will be approved and the outcome of the U.S. election does not change our thinking,” Alex Pourbaix, the company’s president of energy and oil pipelines, told TransCanada’s annual investor conference.

Obama rejected TransCanada’s application 10 months ago, citing concerns about the risks posed to an environmentally sensitive area in Nebraska by the pipeline’s original route.

The president invited TransCanada to submit another application after rerouting the pipeline around Nebraska’s Sandhills, necessitating another State Department environmental review of the project. The State Department is involved because the pipeline crosses an international border.

After working closely with Nebraska officials to develop a new route, the company submitted another application in May.

Public hearings into the new route are scheduled for December, and then Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman will review it. TransCanada could know the fate of Keystone XL in just a few months.

Environmentalists, meantime, are pointing to the devastation wrought by superstorm Sandy last month as reason to reject the pipeline once and for all.

Keystone XL would bring 700,000 barrels of carbon-intensive oilsands crude a day from Alberta, through six states to Gulf Coast refineries.

Al Gore, the former vice-president who’s now a leading climate champion, has called on Obama to seize the moment and use his decisive re-election triumph to take serious action. Approving Keystone, he added, would be lunacy.

“The tar sands are just the dirtiest source of liquid fuel you can imagine,” he said in an interview with Britain’s The Guardian newspaper. “At a time when we are desperately trying to bend the emissions curve downwards, it is quite literally insane to open up a whole new source that is much more carbon-intensive.”

He also urged Obama to push for a carbon tax in negotiations with congressional Republicans over a looming budget crisis dubbed the “fiscal cliff.”

“President Obama does have a mandate, should he choose to use it, to act boldly to solve the climate crisis, to begin solving it,” Gore said.

Some conservative think-tanks have recently raised the possibility of such a carbon tax, but Obama suggested there was little appetite for it.

When asked if there’s an absence of consensus on taxing emissions from fossil fuels, he replied: “That I am pretty certain of.”

Climate change was barely mentioned during the recent presidential campaign until Sandy roared ashore in late October.