Washington
\nA federal judge in Montana on Wednesday ordered the US State Department to do a full environmental review of a revised route for the Keystone XL crude oil pipeline, a move that could delay the project and prove a setback for the Trump administration.<\/p>\n
For more than a decade, environmentalists, tribal groups, and ranchers have fought the $8-billion, 1,180-mile (1,900-km) pipeline to carry heavy crude to Steele City in Nebraska from Canada\u2019s oilsands in Alberta.<\/p>\n
US District Court Judge Brian Morris ruled for the Indigenous Environmental Network and other plaintiffs, ordering the review of a revised pipeline route through Nebraska to supplement one the department did on the original path in 2014.<\/p>\n
In his ruling, Morris said the State Department was obligated to \u201canalyze new information relevant to the environmental impacts of its decision\u201d to issue a permit for the pipeline last year.<\/p>\n
Supporting the project are Canadian oil producers, who face price discounts over transport bottlenecks, and US oil interests and pipeline builders.<\/p>\n
TransCanada Corp, which wants to build Keystone XL, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the ruling. It hopes to start preliminary work in Montana in coming months and begin construction in the second quarter of 2019.<\/p>\n
The ruling was \u201ca rejection of the Trump administration\u2019s attempt to flout the law and force Keystone XL on the American people,\u201d said Jackie Prange, a lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group.<\/p>\n
In 2015, then President Barack Obama, a Democrat, rejected the pipeline, saying it would add to emissions that cause climate change and would mostly benefit Canadians.<\/p>\n
President Donald Trump, a Republican, pushed to approve the pipeline soon after he took office. A State Department official signed a so-called presidential permit in 2017 allowing the line to move forward.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Washington A federal judge in Montana on Wednesday ordered the US State Department to do a full environmental review of a revised route for the Keystone XL crude oil pipeline, a move that could delay the project and prove a setback for the Trump administration. For more than a decade, environmentalists, tribal groups, and ranchers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":39244,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39243"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39243\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39245,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39243\/revisions\/39245"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39244"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}