The federal government has quietly approved major tar sands transportation projects with unstudied environmental effects — managing to circumvent the executive branch’s impact analysis that paralyzed development of the Keystone XL pipeline and bolstered activists’ claims that the project is dangerous and damaging to the environment.

Over the past few years, the Keystone pipeline has become a household name. The controversy caused by Canadian pipeline company TransCanada’s project, which would bring hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil from Canada’s tar sands to the U.S. each day, has ignited an environmental movement across the country, and has elicited responses from top U.S. politicians, including President Obama.

But the U.S. has approved other cross-border tar sands transportation projects with little fanfare.

Those projects include one by TransCanada competitor Enbridge to build a facility in Illinois to transport crude oil from the tar sands via train, which was approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) last week. The decision came just weeks after the State Department approved an Enbridge pipeline project that would cross Canada through the Minnesota border and help bring millions more barrels of oil to the U.S. each year. The project was approved without a public review process or an environmental-impact assessment.

Environmental activists say the two approvals show that the tar sands industry is intent on getting tar sands oil to the U.S. regardless of whether Keystone is approved. And the approvals may show the industry has taken a lesson from the current Keystone debacle about how to move tar sands oil without public relations headaches.

“There’s been a pretty deliberate attempt to try and avoid the permitting process and public involvement,” said Doug Hayes, a staff attorney with the Sierra Club. “While everyone was paying attention to Keystone, there were all these other projects being approved behind closed doors.”

Pipelines that cross an international border need to go through an often-lengthy review process, and that is what has stalled TransCanada’s Keystone plans, as President Obama delays a decision on whether to approve the pipeline time and time again.

The Keystone XL pipeline has been one of the most contentious oil projects of the last decade for good reason: The pipeline would move as many as 830,000 barrels of oil from Alberta, Canada, to Nebraska, where it would then be transferred to other pipelines that snake their way down to Gulf Coast oil refineries in Texas and Louisiana. Environmentalists say the project would guarantee the further development of the tar sands in Canada — a previously pristine area that has been extensively mined for oil that’s particularly carbon-intensive to process. The mining of the sands (which are actually filled with oil-rich bitumen, not tar) has already produced enough annual greenhouse gases to rival the combined emissions of New Zealand and Kenya. And the Canadian government has pushed to triple tar sands production in the coming decade.

But as Obama’s decision (or lack thereof) on that pipeline receives the brunt of the public’s scrutiny, other projects that would also bring hundreds of thousands of barrels of tar sands oil to the U.S. have slipped by with barely a blip in the news.