Adam Martin on Keystone XL.

The U.S. State Department approval of the Keystone XL Pipeline is great news for South Dakota. This modern piece of infrastructure will bring jobs to the state and boost its economy.

The Keystone XL debate is not new. For eight long years, President Barack Obama purposely kept Keystone in limbo to appease environmental activists.

President Trump wasted little time reversing course, recently issuing a federal permit for the project to continue. When completed, the Keystone XL Pipeline will carry crude oil from western Canada to refineries on America’s gulf coast. The new 875-mile segment running across South Dakota from Montana and ending in Steele City, Nebraska, will fully connect the northern section to the already completed southern section of the project.

Keystone XL will bring huge economic benefits, welcome news to South Dakotans and the place I call home. This project will be one of the most economically viable projects to impact rural communities in recent history. The pipeline will create thousands of well-paying jobs, including approximately 3,500 construction jobs in the states through which the pipeline will travel.

We all agree this influx in construction staff is temporary, but so is tearing out an old bridge on Interstate 90 and constructing a new one. That’s the nature of infrastructure-related construction projects. Every major infrastructure project from bridges to pipelines will create construction work and benefit South Dakotans for years to come.

Keystone will also benefit rural economies across the state. Due to budget shortfalls, rural communities are continually searching for funds just to maintain basic public services. Keystone XL will support urgently needed tax dollars for updating rural fire department equipment, school facilities and deteriorating county roads and bridges.

What’s more, the Keystone XL project will support opportunities for a vast amount of service-related companies in western and central South Dakota. As services are needed during construction of Keystone XL, we’ll see an increase in business at local mechanic shops, tire shops, convenience stores, and restaurants along the route.

Once construction is complete, South Dakota alone will see an additional $17.9 million annually in new property tax revenue and an increase in sales and excise tax revenue of $46.5 million over two years.

TransCanada’s willingness to communicate with stakeholders along the route, including indigenous communities has been nothing short of impressive. When this project finally comes to fruition, we will work together through effective engagement to share information on the project, gather input from leadership in indigenous communities, and ensure project safety for all South Dakotans.

South Dakota has long been sending a strong message to Washington: We want Keystone XL. Both the South Dakota House and Senate passed a resolution urging the State Department to approve the Keystone permit “in order to strengthen the United States’ energy security, provide for critical pipeline infrastructure to achieve North American energy independence, and to stimulate the economy and create jobs.”

With the State Department’s approval granted, national energy policy is once again making both our national and local economies a priority.

Adam Martin is a former councilman for the city of Sturgis with 23 years combined experience in business development and local, state and federal government relations. He is the executive director of South Dakota Oil and Gas Association, serving members throughout SD, ND, and CO.

Today Donald Trump cleared the way to Keystone XL (Peter Barker and Coral Davenport)

WASHINGTON — President Trump sharply changed the federal government’s approach to the environment on Tuesday as he cleared the way for two major oil pipelines that had been blocked, and set in motion a plan to curb regulations that slow other building projects.

In his latest moves to dismantle the legacy of his predecessor, Mr. Trump resurrected the Keystone XL pipeline that had stirred years of debate, and expedited another pipeline in the Dakotas that had become a major flash point for Native Americans. He also signed a directive ordering an end to protracted environmental reviews.

“I am, to a large extent, an environmentalist, I believe in it,” Mr. Trump said during a meeting with auto industry executives. “But it’s out of control, and we’re going to make it a very short process. And we’re going to either give you your permits, or we’re not going to give you your permits. But you’re going to know very quickly. And generally speaking, we’re going to be giving you your permits.”

The decisions expanded an effort to unravel much of the policy structure left by former President Barack Obama, who made fighting climate change a central priority. Just a day earlier, Mr. Trump formally abandoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an ambitious 12-nation trade pact negotiated by Mr. Obama.

Continue reading the main story

In his opening days in office, Mr. Trump has also modified or reversed Mr. Obama’s policies on health care, abortion and housing while ordering a freeze of any pending regulations left behind by the former administration.

The pipelines were more about symbol than substance but generated enormous passion on both sides of the debate. Mr. Obama rejected the proposed Keystone pipeline in 2015, arguing that it would undercut American leadership in curbing the reliance on carbon energy. The Army sidetracked the Dakota Access pipeline in North Dakota last month in the waning days of the Obama administration.

Environmental activists quickly denounced Mr. Trump’s decisions. “Donald Trump has been in office for four days, and he’s already proving to be the dangerous threat to our climate we feared he would be,” said Michael Brune, the executive director of the Sierra Club.

Mr. Trump made clear on the campaign trail that he saw Mr. Obama’s environmental policies as a threat to the economy and dismissed climate change as a hoax perpetrated by China. Myron Ebell, a climate change denier who headed Mr. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency transition team, has drafted a 50-page blueprint for how he could eliminate Mr. Obama’s climate change policies. “It is designed to implement all of the president’s campaign trail promises — every single one,” Mr. Ebell said this week in an interview.

Mr. Trump’s biggest target may be emission rules that would force the closing of hundreds of coal-fired power plants meant to be replaced by wind and solar power. But they are caught up in court battles that could run for months or years.

By contrast, he could more quickly soften Mr. Obama’s rules requiring tougher vehicle emission standards. Mr. Trump met on Tuesday with executives of major American automakers, who complained that before leaving office, Mr. Obama finalized an ambitious E.P.A. rule requiring that vehicles average 54.5 miles per gallon by 2026. Mr. Trump said he would help with burdensome regulations, but offered no specifics.

Mr. Trump could lift a moratorium instituted last year by Mr. Obama on new coal mining leases on public lands. As soon as next month, the Republican-led Congress may pass legislation undoing Mr. Obama’s regulations on the practice of mountaintop-removal coal mining and on leaks of planet-warming methane emissions from oil and gas drilling rigs.

In the meantime, the Keystone and Dakota pipelines provided Mr. Trump with visible ways to demonstrate action. As proposed by TransCanada, an Alberta firm, Keystone would carry 800,000 barrels a day from the Canadian oil sands to the Gulf Coast. Republicans and some Democrats said that it would create jobs and expand energy resources, while environmentalists said it would encourage a form of oil extraction that produces more gases that warm the planet than normal petroleum.

Studies showed that the pipeline would not have a momentous effect on jobs or the environment, but both sides made it into a symbolic test case. The State Department estimated that Keystone would support 42,000 temporary jobs for two years — about 3,900 of them in construction and the rest through indirect support, like food service — but only 35 permanent jobs. Similarly, the government concluded that Keystone’s carbon emissions would equal less than 1 percent of the total greenhouse gas emissions in the United States.

“Keystone has never been a significant issue from an environmental point of view in substance, only in symbol,” said David L. Goldwyn, an energy market analyst and a former head of the State Department’s energy bureau in the Obama administration.

But it was a symbol Mr. Trump found important enough to seize on early in his presidency. He signed an executive memorandum inviting TransCanada “to promptly resubmit its application to the Department of State for a presidential permit” for the pipeline, although the document did not guarantee approval.

The president told reporters he would “renegotiate some of the terms” — including possibly an insistence that the pipeline be built with American steel — but left little doubt that he wanted it approved. “We’ll see if we can get that pipeline built,” he said. “A lot of jobs.”

In a statement, TransCanada accepted his invitation to seek permission again. “We are currently preparing the application and intend to do so,” the company said, vowing that it would create jobs and still protect waterways and other sensitive resources.

The Dakota Access pipeline in North Dakota became the focus of protests when the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe objected to its construction less than a mile from its reservation. The tribe and its allies won victory last month when the Army Corps of Engineers announced that it would look for alternative routes for the $3.7 billion pipeline instead of allowing it to be drilled under a dammed section of the Missouri River.

Mr. Trump signed an executive memorandum directing the Army “to review and approve in an expedited manner” the pipeline, “to the extent permitted by law and as warranted.” In his session with reporters, he added, “Again, subject to terms and conditions to be negotiated by us.”

Mr. Trump owned stock in Energy Transfer Partners, the company that is building the Dakota Access pipeline, according to his most recent filing with the Federal Election Commission. Last month, a spokesman for Mr. Trump said he sold all of his stock in June, but there is no way of verifying that sale, and Mr. Trump has not provided documentation of it.

Critics vowed to keep resisting the projects. Jan Hasselman, a lawyer for Earthjustice, an environmental law group representing the tribe, said Mr. Trump was discarding the findings of a review. “They’re just ignoring the problems that the government has already found,” he said, “and that is the kind of thing that courts need to review very closely.”

In Canada, the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau welcomed Mr. Trump’s decision. “We have been supportive of this since the day we were sworn into government,” Jim Carr, the natural resources minister, told reporters. Mr. Carr said the American reversal will lead “to a deepening of the relationship across the border.”

In addition to the Keystone and Dakota directives, Mr. Trump signed three others intended to ease the way for businesses and to promote American manufacturing. One instructed the Commerce Department to develop a plan to ensure that future pipelines built in the United States be constructed of American-made materials.

Another was aimed at streamlining what he called “the incredibly cumbersome, long, horrible permitting process and reducing regulatory burdens for domestic manufacturing.” The last directive was intended to expedite environmental reviews for “high-priority infrastructure projects” like highways and bridges.

Some news reports on Tuesday said that the E.P.A. and other departments had issued orders forbidding employees from issuing news releases or posting on social media. But longtime officials in multiple agencies said the guidance was similar to that of when Mr. Obama took office eight years ago.

Ian Austen contributed reporting from Ottawa and 

Jack Healy from Denver.

President-elect Donald Trump's plan: Keystone XL - Bloomberg.

President-elect Donald Trump’s plan to put a supporter of the Keystone XL pipeline into a crucial decision-making position may give the controversial pipeline a leg up.

If approved as Secretary of State, Exxon Mobil Corp. Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Rex Tillerson would be in a position to approve the pipeline’s presidential permit, a requirement for energy projects that cross an international border. President Barack Obama rejected the $8 billion project in 2015, saying it wasn’t in the national interest.

“Keystone XL would do more than deliver oil from Alberta and North Dakota’s Bakken Shale to refiners on the Gulf Coast,” Tillerson said in an April 2015 speech. “It would improve U.S. competitiveness, increase North American energy security, and strengthen the relationship with one of our most important allies and trading partners.”

Trump has expressed support for infrastructure projects, including adding pipelines. He said this weekend that he will issue a decision “fairly quickly” on Keystone, in addition to saying “something will happen” on the controversial Dakota Access pipeline.

Project Writedown

TransCanada Corp. was forced to write down $3 billion after the plan was rejected by the Obama administration. The company filed suit over the denial and began one of the largest trade appeals ever brought against the U.S., seeking to recoup $15 billion of costs and damages.

Tillerson’s potential appointment "has a meaningful impact on how we should think about Trump’s international energy policy going forward," but the revival of Keystone XL may not be in his hands, said Katie Bays, an analyst at Height Securities LLC, an advisory and investment firm based in Washington D.C.

The fastest way to approve the project may be to take the State Department out of the process, Bays said. Trying to reverse the previous decision "clearly creates an opportunity for a legal challenge" -- and Tillerson is likely to support a move that lowers the bar for infrastructure projects more broadly.

Advisers to Trump are exploring a strategy to speed up the approval process that includes rescinding a 1968 executive order that put the State Department in charge of permitting border-crossing oil pipelines, according to people familiar with the transition planning.

"It’s primarily political," Bays said. Resurrecting the project is "a feather in the cap for a Republican Congress and a Republican administration."

‘Firmly Committed’

TransCanada remains "firmly committed" to the project and "will be in a better position to provide comment on our next steps and the path forward after the transition process has been settled," spokesman Mark Cooper said in an e-mailed statement.

"TransCanada does not feel it is its place to speak to the transition process in the U.S.," he said. "We are sensitive to the enormous amount of work that is going into forming the new administration and are respectful of that."

The company’s shares rose as much as 2.6 percent to C$60.49 on Tuesday, the most intraday since Nov. 9.

If the pipeline operator did reapply for the border-crossing permit that Obama rejected, the Trump administration would approve it, but the project may get caught up in the same local fights it did the first time, said Erika Coombs, an analyst at BTU Analytics LLC.

Reapplying through the State Department may also entail updating previous environmental reviews, which would be expensive, Coombs said. "It’s not going to be easier the second time."

Project Risk

In Canada, Kinder Morgan Inc.’s Trans Mountain expansion and Enbridge Inc.’s Line 3 replacement were approved earlier this month. That comes as TransCanada’s Energy East pipeline remains mired in regulatory hearings and opposition from environmentalists.

Calgary-based TransCanada may not want to grapple with two controversial projects simultaneously, Coombs said. In addition, with Kinder Morgan and Enbridge projects gaining approval, TransCanada could have a tougher time securing necessary contract volumes for Keystone.

"The economic incentive isn’t as strong as it once was," she said.

Viewed against the backdrop of Energy Transfer Partners LP’s controversial Dakota Access Pipeline, Keystone is poised to be a public-relations nightmare if TransCanada pursues it, said Height’s Bays.

"Keystone would be an easier project if it had either a lot of political support at the local level or a very strong economic argument," Bays said. "And both of those issues are kind of lukewarm."

Meenal Vamburkar.