“We have to do a little work on this,” Pourbaix said, “but it appears that if we have shipper support, we would have the opportunity to potentially move forward on segments of the pipeline before we finalize the presidential permit for the cross-border portion of the pipeline.”





But Pourbaix, TransCanada’s President of Energy and Oil Pipelines, stressed that the company’s end goal is to connect the “massive reserves” in Alberta, Canada to the “largest refining center in the world”—the U.S. Gulf Coast.

In the end, he said, he can’t imagine a scenario where the Keystone pipeline won’t be found to be in the national interest of the United States.

“Our opponents would have you think this issue is big oil. This isn’t,” he said. “This is about giving jobs to welders in Montana who’ve been out of work for two years. This is about real people and real jobs.”

But he understands that political forces are at work.

“I would be rather naïve if I didn’t believe to some degree the ultimate approval of this pipeline has been tied up in politics,” he said.

AP and Reuters contributed to this report.

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