The on-again, off-again Keystone XL pipeline gained new traction in Nebraska on Wednesday.
State legislators authorized the state Department of Environmental Quality to begin evaluating options for a new route outside the sensitive Nebraska Sandhills, the marshy hills and grasslands that lie atop the nation’s most important agricultural aquifer.
Critics of the pipeline, which would carry tar sands oil from Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast, say the legislation amounts to a rubber stamp for TransCanada. The Canadian company is maneuvering to build the $7-billion pipeline, and the project’s political travails have become a poster child for the nation’s energy woes.
The bill, passed on a 44-5 vote, sidesteps an earlier law adopted in a special session of the Legislature only last fall. That measure requires most new oil pipelines to undergo a rigorous review process through the publicly elected Public Service Commission.
The new measure instead allows the Department of Environmental Quality to study the route. It also allows the governor — who has already said he wants the pipeline to go forward, as long as it avoids the Sandhills — to decide whether to approve or deny it.
Gov. Dave Heineman is expected to sign the bill into law, though opponents already are considering the possibility of constitutional challenges.
“It’s crystal clear to us that the senators who voted for this wanted to rubber-stamp a route for TransCanada, and make it as quick and easy as possible for TransCanada to get their route approved, even before they have a federal permit,” Jane Kleeb of Bold Nebraska, a citizens group fighting the pipeline, said in an interview.
She said the bill would allow TransCanada to acquire rights of way for the pipeline from reluctant ranchers through eminent domain once the governor approved the new route.
“We thought the senators worked for the citizens of Nebraska, not a foreign corporation, but clearly we were wrong,” she said.
The biggest problem with routing the pipeline through the Sandhills is soil erosion not contamination to the Ogallala Aquifer. The Sandhills get their name from the soils that are primarily sand and highly susceptible to erosion once the grass cover has been removed.