A pipeline to carry oil from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, to Steele City, Neb., and onward to refineries in Texas has been in the works for a dozen years. President Donald Trump took office saying he wanted to see the project done.
While the Keystone XL Pipeline made headway on Trump's watch, it is far from completed and now faces opposition from President-elect Joe Biden. As Trump leaves office, here's where the project stands.
Out of the 900 miles planned on American soil, a 1.2 mile section is largely completed in Montana at the U.S.-Canada border.
In April 2020, a federal district court judge in Montana said pipeline operator TC Energy needed to do more work to comply with the Endangered Species Act. The judge's order blocked any dredging that would affect about 700 stream crossings along the planned route, effectively putting work on pause.
Despite an appeal by TC Energy, the Supreme Court ruled July 6 that the Keystone XL pipeline must go through a full endangered species review.
TC Energy remains committed to the project. This past October, it said it had awarded $1.6 billion in contracts to six American pipeline construction companies.
The Canadian government announced that it will press the Biden administration to allow the project to move forward. The government of Alberta has invested over $1 billion in the project and hopes that the faster work proceeds on its side of the border, the harder it will be to stop it on the American side.
In terms of Trump's promise to get the pipeline built, the small section that has actually been dug leaves the project well short of the goal, and it remains vulnerable to executive and legal opposition.
One key vulnerability is the federal permit that allowed construction at the U.S.-Canada border. Trump granted it through direct presidential action, rather than through a ruling by the State Department.
"As a presidential order, the permit wasn't subject to the need for an environmental review," explained University of Minnesota Law School professor Alexandra Klass. "Biden could either revoke the permit on his own authority, or he could pass the responsibility back to the State Department, where they could deny the permit."
Klass said she would expect TC Energy to take that to court. One argument in the company's favor, she said, is that construction has started in Montana, but there's no guarantee that would carry the day.
We reached out to TC Energy, as well as many of the construction companies that contracted to do the work, and did not hear back.
Anthony Swift with the Natural Resources Defense Fund, a group opposed to the pipeline, said the company moved quickly to award construction contracts, but "those contracts don't allow it to move forward with work if it doesn't have the permit it needs."
In addition to getting the core federal permit allowing any work to proceed, Swift noted, the pipeline faces several other legal challenges in several states.
Pipeline construction has barely begun, and the Biden administration has promised to block it. We rate this a Promise Broken.