Russ Girling, chief executive officer of TransCanada Corp., pauses during an interview in New York, U.S., on Thursday, July 18, 2013. (Scott Eells/Bloomberg)

WASHINGTON — Russ Girling knows now that a presidential pipeline permit from Donald Trump won’t buy him a cup of coffee in Omaha.

Nor will it permit the CEO of TransCanada Corporation to start digging a 1,900-kilometre trench across five states and two provinces for the long-delayed and bitterly controversial Keystone XL pipeline, intended to funnel 800,000 barrels a day of gooey, carbon-laden bitumen from Alberta to American refinery complexes on the Gulf of Mexico.

Instead, Mr. Trump’s permission — issued with great fanfare last January 24 — wasn’t the final say on the subject, any more than former President Barack Obama’s 2015 rejection of the project as a threat to the planet. Both decisions left Keystone XL trapped in a legal morass with an uncertain future.

Just as Mr. Girling slapped the Obama White House with a $15 billion lawsuit and threatened to invoke NAFTA to force the next Oval Office tenant to allow Canada’s crude to flow across the United States, so too have opponents of the ‘tar sands’ clogged the regulatory process with lawsuits and made Keystone XL a political issue.

Nebraska’s November ‘approval’ of TransCanada’s route turned out to be just another setback to the Canadian oilpatch’s dream of finding cost-effective means to get Alberta’s expensive-to-extract bitumen to world markets. Nebraska didn’t approve TransCanada’s route but rather an alternative path that adds length, complexity, cost and, possibly, years of additional uncertainty to the project. Nebraska regulators also unanimously rejected the company’s effort to retroactively apply for the approved route.

So Mr. Girling faces a stark choice. He can toss in the towel and admit that Keystone XL has become so politically toxic, so controversial, that spending years and more millions of dollars seeking approval wouldn’t be worth the effort.

Or he can double-down and hope to start digging within two or three years — the minimum period even optimistic backers of Keystone XL believe it will take to surmount the remaining regulatory and legal hurdles. Add on another two or three years for construction and you get a sense of when Keystone XL might (emphasis on might) be operational. Mr. Girling claims to be “very encouraged” by his prospects for lining up sufficient binding contracts — despite low oil prices and the growing glut of American domestic production that will transform the United States from a major importer to a net oil exporter in less than a decade.

But pipelines take decades to pay their investors back. TransCananda still needs to find billions in financing, predicated on whether Alberta’s producers will still be financially viable in 2040 or 2050.

TransCanada has gone quiet about Keystone XL. The promised December announcement on whether it had secured enough firm commitments never materialized. TransCanada has gone quiet about Keystone XL. The promised December announcement on whether it had secured enough firm commitments never materialized.

As originally envisioned, Keystone XL was a $5 billion project intended for completion in 2013, when oil was priced at nearly $100 barrel. Five years later, the project’s estimated cost has nearly doubled, oil prices hover around $60 and the world’s big producers are throttling back to prop up prices. Meanwhile, Alberta’s landlocked crude fetches up to $20 less than West Texas oil.

Matthew Miller, a Denver-based analyst at CFRA, an investment research firm, has been watching Keystone XL closely. He said he believes there’s “still a strong commercial case to build the pipeline.” The Gulf Coast refining complexes were designed to process the thick, heavy crudes common to Alberta and Venezuela — and with the South American producer on the verge of collapse and oil-by-rail still expensive, the long-term demand for Canadian oilsands product remains, he said.

But Mr. Miller acknowledges that Keystone XL isn’t just about economics.

“At some point, TransCanada will get so fed up and decide the process is too costly” to continue, he said. Already, he added, the market values TransCanada as though Keystone XL isn’t a factor. And the company’s three-year capital plan is focused almost entirely on natural gas pipelines.

TransCanada has gone quiet about Keystone XL. The promised December announcement on whether it had secured enough firm commitments never materialized. TransCanada usually is keen to tout Keystone XL but spokespeople for the company didn’t respond to multiple queries this week about the project’s prospects in 2018.

Meanwhile, an array of opponents — from ranchers and Aboriginal Peoples in Nebraska to major environmental groups and deep-pocketed climate-change activists in California — vow to thwart Keystone XL. They have transformed a single pipeline into an icon of evil in the war against man-made global warming.

Among Americans, support for the Canadian export pipeline has steadily slid — from 60 per cent in 2014 to about 40 per cent after Mr. Trump’s approval, according to Pew Research.

The National Resources Defense Council, one of the foremost opponents of Keystone XL, argues that the project is financially doomed as well as environmentally irresponsible and dangerous.

Even “if TransCanada were to eventually prevail (in winning approvals after several more years), it would be stuck with a tar sands pipeline coming online at a time when Canadian energy regulators expect tar sands production growth to have slowed to almost zero in anticipation of a peak in the mid-2020s,” said Joshua Axelrod, an NDRC analyst. “If TransCanada is realistic, they wouldn’t move forward with this project.”

Mr. Trump seems to have mostly lost interest in Keystone XL since he discovered that there was nothing in it for U.S. steelmakers, despite his original vow that only U.S. steel would be used to build the pipeline. TransCanada had long ago purchased and stockpiled non-U.S. steel — much of it from a Russian-owned firm — for the pipeline.

But that hasn’t stopped the president from claiming — falsely — that construction is underway as a consequence of his approval days after his inauguration last January. “Keystone is starting. It’s actually already started,” he insisted in November.

President Trump is out of touch; Prime Minister Justin Trudeau remains vaguely supportive. “I’ve been on the record for many years supporting [Keystone XL] because it leads to economic growth and good jobs for Albertans,” he said, cheering Mr. Trump’s decision last January.

But Ottawa still hasn’t explained how it can meet its ambitious emissions reduction targets while aggressively mining the oilsands.

The next move is Mr. Girling’s.

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