Keystone pipeline re-routed, activists continue blockade at Texas site

The battle over the controversial Keystone oil pipeline continues after TransCanada Corp said they will avoid constructing on the Nebraska Sandhills, a fragile region of prairie and sand dunes that is home to various plants and wildlife, with thousands of ponds and lakes.

Earlier in the year President Barack Obama delayed a decision on the pipeline, citing environmental concerns over the pipeline’s planned route near a major aquifer and the Sandhills in Nebraska.

“Based on feedback from the Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality and the public, we have refined our proposed routing,” Russ Girling, TransCanada’s president and chief executive officer, said in a press release.

Regardless, environmental activists have vowed to continue battling the pipeline and chained themselves to bulldozers in Texas last Wednesday, temporarily stopping route-clearance work TransCanada, meanwhile, has pressed forward. The company came out Wednesday with the proposed new routing.

Environmental concerns are only part of the controversy that has been brewing over the Keystone pipeline, which is being constructed to transport tar sands oil to texas refineries. To build such a massive project through the heartland of North America, TransCanada has slowly been acquiring property rights to build each section of the pipeline, sometimes employing state power to overtake private property through eminent domain, and paying property owners through condemnation compensation.

The new route will avoid some of the areas about which residents and the state Department of Environmental Quality had expressed their greatest concern. Among them are a wellhead protection area in the town of Clarks and other areas not technically within the Sandhills but which have the same sandy, erodible soils with thin topsoil that are characteristic of the Sandhills.

A public affairs official with the Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality said he expected the state to publish maps of the new route on its website later on Wednesday. Construction on the 700,000 barrels per day southern part of the line, renamed the Gulf Coast project, has already begun after Obama gave his support for that section.

The Gulf Coast project will drain a glut of crude in the U.S. midsection fed mostly by the oil boom in North Dakota.

In addition to submitting the supplemental review to Nebraskan officials, the company says it will also provide an environmental report to the State Department on Friday. The northern section of the line needs approval from the State Department because it crosses the national border.