The wait continues.

A long-awaited decision on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline extension will not come until 2015.

This fall, the Nebraska Supreme Court heard arguments in three landowners’ legal challenge to the $5.4 billion pipeline’s proposed route, which runs 1,200 miles from the tar sands in Western Canada to refineries in the Midwest, terminating in Steel City, Nebraska.

The court had been releasing its rulings for this term each Friday this month, but the court was closed for the Christmas holiday this Friday — the last of the month — meaning remaining decisions, including Keystone, will not be released until after Jan. 1.

Because the pipeline crosses an international border, it ultimately requires a presidential permit from Barack Obama. Obama has delayed issuing a decision on the project, pending an environmental review from the State Department, which itself has postponed releasing its report until the Nebraska court hands down its decision.

“We remain confident the president will stand with farmers, ranchers, and tribal communities over a foreign oil company that wants to get tar sands to the export market,” Jane Kleeb, director of Bold Nebraska, an advocacy group that opposes the pipeline, said in a call with reporters earlier this month.

In February, a Nebraska state judge struck down a law that allowed Gov. David Heineman, a Republican, and pipeline owner TransCanada to sidestep regulators and use eminent domain to build the pipeline on private land.

Environmental groups say the pipeline will encourage energy companies to develop the tar sands, where extracting oil emits huge amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas contributing to global warming. They also warn it will put communities at risk of spills from the pipeline, and increase the country’s reliance on fossil fuels.

TransCanada and pipeline advocates, by contrast, contend the pipeline will reduce U.S. dependency on oil imported from overseas, create jobs and strengthen economic and diplomatic ties with the country’s closest ally, Canada. They also argue that pipelines are a far safer method of transporting oil than ship, truck or rail.



Photos: The Keystone Pipeline's Journey View All 15 Images

“There is tremendous support for the project from the people of Nebraska,” TransCanada spokesman Mark Cooper told The Hill.

Obama, however, in an end-of-year press conference last week, expressed skepticism about the project’s economic potential.

“It would save Canadian oil companies and the Canadian oil industry an enormous amount of money if they could simply pipe it all the way through the United States down to the Gulf,” the president said. “Sometimes the way this gets sold is, you know, ‘Let’s get this oil, and it’s going to come here,’ and the implication is that that’s going to lower gas prices here in the United States. It’s not.”

TransCanada CEO Russ Girling has said building Keystone XL will create about 42,000 jobs. State Department analysis of the project, however, has found it will offer only about 2,000 jobs for about a year, and roughly 50 permanent jobs once completed.