Trump Says It’s Time to Restart Keystone XL Pipeline Construction.

President Donald Trump, writing on his social media platform Truth Social, has let the world know that he wants the Keystone XL pipeline built. Keystone XL, which was planned to transport crude oil from Alberta, Canada to Steele City, Nebraska (where it would hook into existing pipelines going east and south), was started during the first Trump Administration but was scuttled by Joe Biden on the first day of his presidency.

“The company building the Keystone XL Pipeline that was viciously jettisoned by the incompetent Biden Administration should come back to America, and get it built – NOW!,” Trump wrote.

The president said his administration is “very different” than “the incompetent Biden Administration,” and promised “easy approvals” and an “almost immediate start” to the project.

The Keystone XL pipeline was planned to move 830,000 barrels per day of crude oil from Alberta’s oil sands into the U.S. , and would have been fully built and functional by early-2023.

The pipeline proposal was denied by President Barack Obama in 2015. But Obama kept the companies behind the pipeline in limbo for years, before finally lowering the hammer. Trump approved the project, the opponents (tribal interests and environmentalists) never stopped suing, bringing numerous cases which prevented construction progress. Finally, Biden came to power and he closed the project down on Day-One, saying the cancellation advanced “environmental justice.”

Republican Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), criticized the cancellation, saying that Biden had scarified thousands of U.S. jobs, an assertion that was quietly admitted by the Biden Department of Energy in a congressionally required report some two years later.

Having invested heavily in the pipeline project, TC Energy, the company that would have built the Keystone XL pipeline, lost its investment because of Biden’s decision, and within two years it had sold off its oil pipeline business. It’s clear that TC Energy is no longer in the pipeline construction business, so it’s uncertain if, given the difficult history of the pipeline, there will be any takers.