Yesterday’s announcement is an acknowledgement of this reality. Most observers assumed the supreme court would have eventually sided with the landowners as well.Īt that point, TransCanada must have seen the writing on the wall-it was going to have to go through the PSC eventually. Once the company moved to seize the land (only days after the decision), the property owners went back to court and won a series of injunctions in lower courts. The other three justices ruled that the landowners lacked legal standing to bring the case because TransCanada hadn’t yet filed for eminent domain. Only four justices voted to strike down the approval-one short of the required super majority. In January, TransCanada won the case on a legal technicality. Landowners sued, and the case went to the Nebraska Supreme Court. The bill gave the governor the sole right to approve the pipeline-and he did. So in April 2012, the company successfully lobbied for a new state law cutting the PSC out of the process. TransCanada didn’t like that, especially because opposition to the pipeline had been gaining steam. The PSC would hold public hearings and have the right to make changes to the route rather than simply accept or reject it. In November 2011, the Nebraska legislature passed a law that required TransCanada to seek approval for the KXL route from the state’s Public Service Commission, or PSC. ĭoes TransCanada’s move bring the pipeline closer to all dead? There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. In other words, Keystone XL is only mostly dead. But we’re still waiting for his final decision. He called tar sands oil “ extraordinarily dirty” in March and debunked claims that the project would create thousands of U.S. The president still holds the right to approve or reject the pipeline, and his public comments have hinted at the latter. All those efforts have ended in either legislative defeat or a presidential veto. KXL’s friends in Congress have made several attempts to force approval of the pipeline, which is designed to transport tar sands crude from Canada’s northern Alberta to refineries on the Gulf coast. The concession further complicates a process that was already a tangled mess. Given that the company spent three years trying to shortcut the state’s approval process, this is major news. TransCanada announced yesterday that it would submit its Keystone XL pipeline proposal for full consideration by the Nebraska Public Service Commission and withdraw efforts to take landowners’ property via eminent domain.
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