It’s Thursday, June 10, and the company behind Keystone XL is pulling the plug.
The Keystone XL pipeline is officially dead. TC Energy, the developer of the embattled pipeline, is terminating the project, the company announced on Wednesday. The project would have carried 830,000 barrels of crude tar sands oil from Alberta to Nebraska every day.
Are you feeling déjà vu? That’s because President Joe Biden rescinded the pipeline’s federal permit on his very first day in office, effectively killing the project. The latest announcement from TC Energy is the final nail in the coffin — it’s also galvanized the opponents of other controversial pipelines.
“TC Energy’s announcement only increases the urgency for President Joe Biden to act immediately to stop the Line 3 and Dakota Access oil pipelines,” said David Turnbull, strategic communications director for the clean energy advocacy nonprofit Oil Change International, in a statement. While Biden took swift action on Keystone XL, his administration has not taken similar action on the Dakota Access Pipeline and has not yet made a statement about the Line 3 pipeline. Public pressure is mounting on the administration to cancel Line 3 as protests intensify in northern Minnesota.
But Keystone XL, at least, is gone for good. “This project is finally being abandoned thanks to more than a decade of resistance from Indigenous communities, landowners, farmers, ranchers, and climate activists along its route and around the world,” said Turnbull.
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