Texas judge rules Keystone pipeline has eminent domain

TransCanada, the Canadian energy company behind the Keystone XL pipeline can take over land owned by independent Texas farmers, a county judge has ruled. In a short ruling sent from his iPhone, Judge Bill Harris of Lamar County Court upheld TransCanada’s condemnation lawyer of a 50-foot strip of land across Julia Trigg Crawford’s ranch property. The pipeline is being built to carry oil from Canada to Texas refineries.

A defiant Crawford said plans to appeal the ruling. “We may have lost this one battle here in Paris, Texas, but we are far from done,” she said in a written statement. “I will continue to proudly stand up for my own personal rights, the property rights of my family, and those of other Texans fighting to protect their land.”

The ruling by Judge Bill Harris removes yet another potential obstacle for TransCanada, which already has permits from the Army Corps of Engineers for the southern leg of the pipeline, which starts in Cushing, Okla., and runs to Port Arthur, Texas. TransCanada has said it will start building as soon as possible.

In March, President Obama endorsed the construction of the southern leg of the pipeline. He said it would alleviate a supply bottleneck at Cushing, where the benchmark price of oil is set for the U.S. market.

The ruling is the latest legal victory for TransCanada, whose plan to transport heavy oil sands crude through a 1,600-kilometer pipeline across the United States to Texas Gulf Coast refineries has been mired in controversy nearly every step of the way.

But some landowners and environmental groups have been building a campaign to put a halt to construction because of the threat a petroleum leak might pose to rivers, wetlands and humans.

Crawford had asserted that the Keystone XL pipeline was not entitled to eminent domain attorney because the pipeline would not be a common carrier, open to a variety of oil companies. She said that as a private project, it needed to negotiate rights of way without compelling landowners to enter agreements.

The Keystone project took a political tone when Republicans in Congress forced a two-month deadline on President Barack Obama to sign off on the international pipeline. Mr. Obama rejected TransCanada’s proposed route earlier this year, suggesting it direct the pipeline around a sensitive aquifer in Nebraska’s Sandhills region. But he encouraged the company to pursue in the meantime a shorter project from Oklahoma to the Gulf Coast.