Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is not ready to give up on Keystone XL regardless of the uncertainty he feels about President Barack Obama’s final verdict, expected in the current quarter.
Harper spoke in Vancouver Jan. 6 during a week-long swing through Western Canada to tout the economic merits of oil sands bitumen pipelines and LNG exports.
During a question-and-answer session at the Vancouver Board of Trade, board Chief Executive Officer Iain Black launched into one question by saying Obama has rejected Keystone XL.
“No, he’s punted,” Harper quickly interjected. “He said ‘maybe.’”
During the fall, Harper said he would “not take no” for an answer from the Obama administration and insisted that the pipeline would eventually be built.
“It is my hope that the (U.S.) administration will in due course — I cannot put a timeline on that — see its way to take the appropriate decision, but that’s obviously a political process in the United States,” he said.
“The good news is that on both sides of the aisle (in the U.S. Congress), in both political parties, in both houses and throughout the American economy and public, there is widespread support for the project.”
Harper said the fact that 99 percent of Canada’s oil and natural gas exports go to the U.S. gives weight to his government’s push to diversify its markets.
“In an era where there is energy demand all over the world, where the energy industry has been the engine of much of Canada’s economic growth and also at a time when, for various reasons, American demand for energy may fall in the near term, it is without doubt in the country’s interests that we diversify our markets,” he said.
TransCanada Chief Executive Officer Russ Girling said in a series of interviews in December that he is counting on a final decision on the controversial northern segment of Keystone XL during the first quarter.
He said future pipeline projects should be disconnected from the political process and “rightly placed in the regulatory processes that are at arm’s length from politics.”
Girling said TransCanada also plans to get “out on the ground in communities along pipeline routes as early in the process as possible. We will try not to leave the playing field wide open for somebody to create a cause célèbre.”
‘Collateral damage’
Marc Spitzer, a former commissioner with the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and now a partner with the law firm of Steptoe & Johnson, said Keystone XL has become “collateral damage” in an increasingly polarized U.S. political environment.
To those wondering why the project has become a “poster child” for the U.S. environmental movement, he said they might as well ask, “why do people care about Miley Cyrus?’”
“It’s one of those accidents of history and the White House made it worse,” Spitzer said, arguing Obama should have “lanced the boil” years ago and approved the pipeline.
Although Harper has avoided getting drawn into the debate over the increasing use of rail to move crude, his visit to Western Canada coincided with the completion of a joint report by the British Columbia and Alberta governments on the viability of using rail if the Northern Gateway and Trans Mountain plans fail.
British Columbia Premier Christy Clark and Alberta Premier Alison Redford formed a working group last July to develop strategies for advancing energy exports by using pipelines and rail to open new markets in Asia.
Ben West, campaign director for ForestEthics, told reporters Jan. 6 that the provinces and petroleum industry are taking an “underhanded” approach to moving commodities.
He said rail provides a “backdoor for industry to bring tankers to the (Pacific) coast without the same sort of public oversight or public process that we`ve had around (Northern Gateway) or would have around the Kinder Morgan pipeline.”
