Oil Pipelines Rejected! Been A Tough Two Days.

Over the weekend, news came out that the hotly contested Atlantic Coast Pipeline project had been cancelled due to spiraling costs.  I never heard anything about it. To my credit though, I was on the water Sunday working on a pretty sweet sunburn. Plus, it's an East Coast thing and we've all had our own regional pipeline controversies.

But wait!  If you were a Midwest pipeline project, well...Monday was your very, very, very bad day.

Monday, I wrote up a story about the Dakota Access Pipeline being shut down for  environmental review.  It could be shut down for over a year!  Needless to say, they will be seeking an appeal.

Monday also brought gloom and potentially doom to the Keystone XL pipeline project.  The Keystone XL is actually phase 4 in the Keystone Pipeline System.  Here's a quick overview from Wikipedia...

The Keystone Pipeline System is an oil pipeline system in Canada and the United States, commissioned in 2010 and now owned solely by TC Energy.^[8] It runs from the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin in Alberta to refineries in Illinois and Texas, and also to oil tank farms and an oil pipeline distribution center in Cushing, Oklahoma.^[9] The pipeline became well known when a planned fourth phase, Keystone XL, attracted opposition from environmentalists, becoming a symbol of the battle over climate change and fossil fuels

Yup, it was former President Barack Obama who delayed the project in 2015 only to have it un-delayed by current President Donald Trump in 2017.  So you can see the Keystone XL project had already attracted some pretty big-hitters.

Monday July 6th the Supreme Court entered the fray.

The Supreme Court actually invalidated a lower court ruling and seemingly ok'd the "fast track"  of getting permits to companies running pipelines over bodies of water.  But the judges ruled that the Keystone XL project must meet the "arduous environmental review process" .

Well, that's a process that takes time. Presidential candidate Joe Biden has indicated that, if elected he would yank the Keystone XL permit.  So the pipeline project will take the summer off and hope for a Trump re-election come November.