Beyond Keystone XL, More Pipelines with More Problems

As the federal review of KXL drags through its fifth year, the contours of the lobbying battle over the pipeline are little-changed since a 2011.

White House sit-in first pulled it from obscurity to totemic status for a resurgent environmental movement.  But even in the growing shadow of their famous cousin, other pipelines proposed to boost oil sands crude are inching along more slowly than first anticipated and facing resistance on multiple fronts.

"What's happening with Keystone is the new normal," Michael Whatley, executive vice president at the industry group Consumer Energy Alliance, said in an interview.  "As the opposition groups bring more scrutiny to these projects, it's not surprising that regulators are going to bring more scrutiny."

American Petroleum Institute senior manager Cindy Schild likened the rise of anti-pipeline campaigns to the not-in-my-backyard local push-back against refinery construction that has stalled new domestic crude processing facilities since the 1970s.

But Schild marveled at the nation's heightened awareness of KXL relative to other pending pipelines that, collectively, would carry nearly triple the well-known project's daily volume of heavy crude out of the remote Alberta oil sands.

Beyond Keystone XL, More Pipelines with More Problems