The Toronto Star, has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on federal and Ontario politics as well as shaping public opinion

Choosing an alternative route for the Keystone XL pipeline will cost TransCanada Corp. time, money, and could send it through other environmentally sensitive areas, industry analysts say.

But it’s also the best chance that the Calgary-based company has to move forward on the massive $7-billion project. With a new route, some previous critics have melted away.

Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman, who had been an opponent, said he has asked the Obama administration to move quickly to push the project forward.

“Our most important objective all along was to move the route. So if we can expedite the supplemental environmental impact assessment and get moving on the construction of the pipeline, we’re all for that,” he said in a press conference in Nebraska Tuesday.

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The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

A year ago, with an election in the offing, Stephen Harper’s government nixed BHP Billiton’s bid for Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan. Public opinion had turned against the Australian giant’s offer in the wake of Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall’s objections. The Harperites, reading the political mood and fearful of losing seats, swallowed their free-enterprise ideology and blocked the takeover.

So it’s a bit rich to listen to certain voices in the Harper government and among the chorus of lobbyists for the $7-billion Keystone XL pipeline decrying the Obama administration’s 11th-hour decision to further study the route through Nebraska. All politics, they claim, and thus all bad.

Of course, the delay was about Barack Obama’s precarious relationship with part of his party’s base. Environmentalists are disappointed in the President’s timid policies; postponing a decision on Keystone might assuage their disappointment.

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The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

WASHINGTON, OTTAWA AND CALGARY— A compromise between top Nebraska politicians and TransCanada Corp. to reroute the Keystone XL oil pipeline around a critical state aquifer has injected new life into the Canadian-led project and upended President Barack Obama’s plan to bury a political hot potato until after the 2012 election.

TransCanada’s decision to divert the pipeline away from the Sand Hills region, which sits atop the Ogallala Aquifer, immediately won the support of Nebraska’s Governor and shattered the anti-Keystone coalition of state politicians and national environmentalists.

With leading Nebraskan legislators now calling on the U.S. State Department to “expedite” its approval of the controversial $7-billion (U.S.) project, the Obama administration faced new pressures from environmentalists to kill the pipeline altogether.

“Our most important objective all along was to move the route.

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The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

Company agrees to shift pipeline from sensitive Nebraska area

OTTAWA, WASHINGTON AND CALGARY – For the oil sands industry, Plan B for Keystone XL looks a lot like Plan A.

After being handed a major setback by the U.S. move to sideline the $7-billion project until at least 2013, TransCanada Corp. appears to have put the project back on the rails with an agreement with key Nebraskan legislators to re-route the line.

Assuming the deal is passed by the full legislature, TransCanada will work with the state’s Department of Environmental Quality to identify a new route to avoid the environmentally sensitive Sand Hills area.

“It’s our sincere hope that with this agreement, we’ve put everybody in a place where they can support the new pipeline route,” Alex Pourbaix, TransCanada’s president for energy and oil pipelines, said in an interview from Lincoln, Neb..

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The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

Now that Barack Obama has kicked the Keystone project down the road, anti-pipeline activists are rejoicing. “This is what it means to change the conversation,” said Naomi Klein. “This is an amazing victory for our movement,” crowed Bill McKibben and his 350.org team.

In fact, the decision to re-review the pipeline route is an amazing victory for political expediency. By ensuring that nothing will happen until after the 2012 election, Mr. Obama buys himself a reprieve with the environmentalists. But nothing else will change.

The U.S. will not consume a litre less of oil if Keystone is never built. It will simply buy the oil from somewhere else. Nor will this decision threaten the long-term future of the oil (oops, tar) sands. If the U.S. doesn’t buy our oil, the Chinese will.

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The Toronto Star, has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on federal and Ontario politics as well as shaping public opinion

TransCanada Corp. and Nebraska agreed Monday to re-route the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline away from a vast underground water source in the state.

The move is sure to re-ignite the fierce debate over environmental concerns about the 2,700-kilometre pipeline versus the appeal of millions dollars in taxes and thousands of jobs for the stagnant U.S. economy.

The massive pipeline, if built, would deliver 700,000 barrels a day of crude from Alberta’s oil sands to refineries in Texas.

The proposed route would have crossed six states, including Nebraska’s ecologically sensitive Sandhills region and the Ogallala aquifer, which provides water for millions in the area.

“If all of this is about the aquifer, that’s an easy thing to fix.

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The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper. Terence Corcoran is the editor and columnist for the Financial Post section of the National Post.

The power to expropriate property to make way for pipelines is weakening

There are a lot of donkeys on whom to pin the blame for the U.S. State Department’s decision to kick TransCanada’s $7-billion Keystone XL pipeline into another political time zone, all of them valid.

One could start, possibly, by fingering the million-dollar public relations team that decided to nickname a sensitive oil-carrying and carbon-emissions facilitating project “XL”, as in extra large—implying bigger, wider and therefore more menacing than your average pipeline.

The Wall Street Journal, in an editorial titled “The Keystone Cop-Out,” also nailed the White House and President Barack Obama as culprits. Here’s a president who wants job creation, favours “shovel ready projects” and less U.S. dependence on oil sources controlled by dangerous foreign potentates.

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The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

Oil from Canada offers the United States energy security into the indefinite future.

The proposed Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico coast offered the immediate promise of 20,000 American construction jobs and many more jobs in oil refining and distribution.

Yet this week, the Obama administration delayed approval of the Keystone pipeline into 2013 — a delay that may well kill the project altogether, at great financial loss. Why?

One theory credits local opposition in the state of Nebraska, by Nebraskans who worry that a fractured pipeline might spill oil and contaminate the state’s aquifer. Nebraska is one of two states that splits its electoral votes, and in 2008 Nebraska contributed one to Barack Obama’s 365 electoral-vote landslide. Supposedly, Obama is eager to protect that single vote.

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The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

“Frankly, Canada and Alberta have badly handled the public
relations when it comes to Keystone and remediation could
help the situation because the White House has opted in
favour of its environmental wing at the expense of the
organized labour one.” (Financial Post Columnist – Diane Francis)

President Barack Obama has kicked the can down the road by postponing until 2013 – after the next U.S. election – permission to build Canada’s Keystone XL oil sands pipeline to Texas.

This decision, in essence, strands the oil sands indefinitely and shuts it out of the U.S. market for years, if not forever. It’s being billed as a temporary setback, but it’s a major and devastating development.

The excuse is a new route is going to be sought to avoid putting pipelines across the aquifer that straddles midAmerica. The reality is the environmental movement, not an aquifer, straddles the United States and cannot be circumvented. The Keystone, and Canada’s oil sands, has become the environmental movement’s line in the sand in a battle to shut down fossil fuel usage even though there are no alternative fuels for 20 or 30 more years.

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