keystonexl
theintercept.com
Nebraska approves Keystone XL pipeline as opponents face criminalization of protests
Nebraska approved the Keystone XL pipeline Monday, eliminating a major hurdle to construction of a project that galvanized opposition across the country.
Keystone XL pipeline runs afoul of the law of supply and demand.
The company that is building the controversial Keystone XL pipeline no doubt wishes Energy Secretary Rick Perry had been right last week when he explained the law of supply and demand.
Editorial: Keystone XL pipeline runs afoul of the law of supply and demand
By the Editorial Board 14 hrs ago (1)
keystone
President Trump, flanked by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, left, and Energy Secretary Rick Perry, right, approves the Keystone XL pipeline on March 24. Now economics threatens to do what environmentalists couldn't: scuttle the pipeline. (AP photo)
The company that is building the controversial Keystone XL pipeline no doubt wishes Energy Secretary Rick Perry had been right last week when he explained the law of supply and demand.
At a coal-fired power plant in West Virginia on Thursday, Perry dismissed worries about the future of coal by saying, “Here’s a little economics lesson: supply and demand. You put the supply out there and the demand will follow.”
In fact, as any first-year economics student learns, supply follows demand. Perry could call TransCanada Corp. of Calgary, Alberta, for verification. The company has spent $3 billion to date on what’s planned to be an 875-mile, $8 billion pipeline from Alberta’s oil sands to Steele City, Neb. There it would link up with existing pipelines that would carry the thick, high-sulfur, tar-sands oil to refineries on the Gulf Coast.
Since its inception in 2008, the project has been dogged by environmental concerns that brought opposition from the Obama administration. President Donald Trump greenlighted it in March.
But now, The Wall Street Journal reports the law of supply and demand has raised its ugly head. There’s an oversupply of oil. The benchmark price is about 38 percent of the $130-a-barrel price in 2008, when the Keystone project was proposed.
TransCanada is having trouble getting commitments from oil companies to use the pipeline. Firms would rather take their chances on spot-market oil, even if they have to pay more to transport it, than risk long-term commitments to the Canadian oil.
TransCanada has said it wants commitments for 90 percent of the pipeline’s capacity before it continues building. Keystone XL will be capable of moving 835,000 barrels a day, with an average transportation toll of $8 a barrel.
Compounding the problem: Western Canada Select oil is more expensive to recover and refine than the benchmark Brent Crude “light sweet” oil. It produces three to four times more greenhouse gases than Brent Crude, which was trading at $49 a barrel last week. Western Canada Select was at $35. A transportation toll of $8 for a $35 barrel of oil doesn’t make economic sense.
In February, the falling demand for Canadian oil led ExxonMobil to write off its entire 3.5 billion barrels of estimated reserves in Alberta oil. American shale oil, plus falling prices for solar and wind energy, have caused analysts to predict that oil prices won’t recover anytime soon.
If Secretary Perry wants to outline a “little economics lesson,” he could point to a company that bought 875 miles of pipe for oil nobody wants, still facing opposition from farmers in Nebraska and an accounting problem. The pipeline investment must be amortized over 50 years, by which time global warming will be impossible to ignore. Just like the law of supply and demand.
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Keystone defiance triggers assault on a constitutional right.
In South Dakota, a law could ban protests amid opposition from Republican ranchers, as many fear a ‘serious threat’ to water.
Bret Clanton might not belong to the most obvious group of opponents to the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. But when a survey crew from TransCanada arrived on his property eight years ago, the rancher and registered Republican – worried they were cattle thieves – says he called the sheriff’s department, and marched out to confront them.
He says the encounter changed his life, and set up a battle that would come to dominate his existence.
On the outer perimeter of the Clanton ranch, where three large sandstone rock formations dominate the otherwise empty horizon, TransCanada later told him they planned to dig up three miles of his land and lay a section of the Keystone XL pipeline. They also hope to bulldoze along another two and half miles of his pastures to make way for an access road.
“I’ve lived here all my life and this ground is pretty much as God, or whoever, made it, and I just want it stay that way,” he says.
Clanton fought them from the beginning and lobbied the state government for several years. But he was made aware almost instantly it was likely to be a losing fight. “From the very first meeting [with TransCanada] I was informed they would have power of condemnation,” he says.
The bleak assessment was correct. As soon as the XL route had received the necessary state approval in South Dakota back in 2010, TransCanada was essentially able to seize control of any private land it needed, in return for a fee, through the power of eminent domain.
A principle protected by the fifth amendment to the US constitution, eminent domain permits the seizure of private land for “public use” in exchange for “just compensation”. It was used by government at the turn of the 19th century, when Clanton’s great grandfather arrived in South Dakota on horseback, driving cattle from the south, to reclaim land for public infrastructure and to preserve historic sites.
But emiment domain has since morphed to empower various gas and oil pipeline companies to construct across the US, buoyed by a 2005 supreme court ruling that found private entities providing “economic development” were essentially providing a public service.
Advocates estimate that dozens of landowners in South Dakota and Montana were essentially forced to settle with TransCanada to avoid eminent domain enactments during the Obama administration.
Close to the north-east border with Montana, Clanton’s remote ranch, outside the small town of Buffalo, is one of the first properties the XL will cross in South Dakota. It marks the Guardian’s first stop-off in the state during a trip that traces the proposed pipeline’s entire length through the US to examine the battles that have reignited after the Trump administration resurrected the project.
It is not just environmentalists and Native Americans lined up against the construction. Registered Republican ranchers like Clanton are also among the opposition, pitting them against the leaders of their own party who have long supported the pipeline.
Every Republican candidate in the 2016 presidential race supported the project. Donald Trump, himself a frequent user of eminent domain in private business, described the power as “wonderful” during the campaign.
Clanton will not say how he voted last year and does not want to engage with the obvious contradictions between his preferred party and his current situation.
“If Hillary Clinton had been elected, she would’ve done the same thing. It was inevitable,” he says. (During the election, Clinton pledged to oppose the project but had expressed tentative support for it during her tenure as secretary of state) .)
Clanton is clinging to the hope that if oil prices continue to fall, the construction may no longer be economically viable. But he expresses a certain resignation already. Perhaps the only landowner still holding out TransCanada in South Dakota lives 350 miles south-east of Clanton’s ranch.
John Harter’s ancestors have ranched cattle close to the south-western border with Nebraska since 1939. The XL is scheduled to bisect a 280-acre grazing pasture that has been in the family since then and the 54-year-old is preparing to battle until the bitter end.
Guided by Christian faith and the values he learned through Shotokan karate – Harter is a level five black belt – he says: “I don’t believe in being bullied, and I won’t be bullied.”
TransCanada eventually took Harter to eminent domain, he claims. But he is now arguing their easement is void due to what he describes as a breach of contract.
“I have told TransCanada that they do not have a legal easement to my property, and if they entered my property, that I would remove them, and if necessary with force,” Harter says.
TransCanada say they have completed easements with every landowner on the XL route within Montana and South Dakota. “We have been working with Mr Harter for several years and we are committed to working with him in the future,” said TransCanada spokesman Terry Cunha.
Harter drives out to the pasture they plan to bulldoze, his navy blue 1978 Ford F-150 bouncing on tufts of windswept wild grass, and reveals he, too, is a registered Republican. The contradiction remains striking, and Harter is clearly discomforted by it.
“Being a conservative is one thing,” he says about those in his party who support the project. “Being a blind conservative is another.”
But it is not only be these rancher’s right to their land that is under threat in South Dakota. It is their right to protest, too.
The 150 miles from Clanton’s pastures to the town of Eagle Butte, in the heart of the Cheyenne River Reservation, is bathed in intense sunlight that colours the distant mountain ranges in a wash of blue. Here, small casinos litter the roadside and tumbleweed rolls across the streets.
The XL is is set to pass just outside the reservation, and will cross underneath the Cheyenne river, a major tributary of the Missouri river and where the reservation’s Sioux tribe get their water from.
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Last month, South Dakota’s Republican governor Dennis Daugaard, a longtime supporter of the XL, signed Senate Bill 176. The new law allows local officials to prohibit groups larger than 20 from congregating on state land, and could criminalize those who attempt to protest on state highways. (The Montana legislature is considering similar legislation.) It was pushed through, without consultation with tribal leaders in the state, as an emergency measure, a follow-on response to the direct action protests at Standing Rock in North Dakota.
Many Native Americans here view the new law as a further assault on their rights after centuries of disenfranchisement. Hundreds are already veterans of Standing Rock, which borders this reservation to the north.
The council chairman Harold Frazier was present throughout these protests, watching as his contemporaries were tear gassed and shot with rubber bullets by police.
“It is something I will never forget,” he says, later branding the new law unconstitutional and suggesting it will be challenged in court. “It was so awesome to see the strength of our people.”
Protest camps, set up to oppose the XL, are already starting to populate at Eagle Butte and other locations throughout the reserve, but leaders won’t discuss their plans in detail. As it is on the Fort Peck reservation in Montana, people here are furious about the perceived lack of consultation with TransCanada and government officials. The renewed fight against the XL is coupled with a desire to galvanize the community here against the many struggles they face.
Almost 40% of residents in Eagle Butte live below the poverty line, and in the hours before the Guardian arrived, the community held a funeral for a nine-year-old girl who killed herself days before. There had been 20 suicide attempts by young girls on the reserve in the past two weeks, a tribal spokesman said.
Ninety miles south, in the state capital of Pierre – a slight detour from the XL’s proposed route – the governor was not available to be interviewed about the new law. Instead, the administration put up a member of Daugaard’s cabinet, who is adamant the legislation does not discriminate against Native American protesters.
Steve Emery, the Republican secretary for tribal relations and himself a member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe is, of course, expected to hold the governor’s line on the issue. But during an interview at his secretarial office, he made an honest admission that is likely to frustrate his boss by undermining the administration’s primary justification for supporting the XL in the first place.
“I certainly don’t think it [the XL pipeline] is going to make any great economic impact on South Dakota or on the native tribes that share our borders,” he says.
Then what is it that the tribes in this state do not understand about the pipeline that explains the Daugaard administration’s support for it?
He pauses, takes a sip of water and after an awkward silence responds: “I am not really sure how to answer that, because I am sure they probably know more about the pipeline than I do.”
Emery’s Rosebud reservation is the last large population concentration the XL will affect in South Dakota. The pipeline is set to cross just north of the reserve, which sits at the very top of the Ogallala aquifer. This groundwater source is one of the world’s largest aquifers, covering around 174,000 sq miles and crossing underneath eight states, supplying drinking water to nearly two million people.
Even a small undetected leak in this area, according to the independent analysis conducted by engineering professor John Stansbury, could contaminate surrounding water sources with intolerable benzene levels “posing serious health threats to anyone [in the vicinity] using the underlying Ogallala Aquifer for drinking water or agriculture”.
Troy Heinert says he is one of those in the potential crosshairs. The aquifer supplies water to his herd of rodeo horses that perform at events around the country. Heinert is also Emery’s cousin and a Democratic state senator, one of only a handful of Native Americans in the Republican-dominated state legislature. He was one of the few to vote against Senate Bill 176, which he brands “dangerous”. Activists on this reserve are planning to resist construction if a last ditched state court appeal against the permit in South Dakota fails.
Heinert empathises with his cousin’s inability to articulate a single reason Native Americans should warm to the project.
“South Dakota has very clean water,” he says as his herd of horses gallop over the pasture to come in for drinking water. “We have over 300,000 people who receive water from rural water systems that could be affected by this. We have no plan if something were to happen.”
“We can live without oil,” he says. “We can’t live without water.”
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Keystone supporters, opponents need to find a way to civilly disagree.
Nebraska protests played at least a part in President Barack Obama rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline as the project became a flashpoint in a national fight over fossil fuels and climate change.
Nebraska protests played at least a part in President Barack Obama rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline as the project became a flashpoint in a national fight over fossil fuels and climate change.
Local resistance to the still-popular project is gearing back up again now that President Donald Trump has reversed the Obama administration and given his blessing to the Keystone XL.
By accident of geography and bureaucracy, this means those old fights are headed back to Nebraska and its catch-all regulator, the state Public Service Commission.
The issue spurs heated opposition, and Nebraskans who want to express their concerns are welcomed to do so. But that opposition needs to stay within responsible bounds. The focus should be on expression of ideas, not disruption or violence.
The Nebraska way of handling controversial issues is through strong debate, not through fomenting mayhem. Mike Flood, a former speaker of the Nebraska Legislature, rightly underscored that point in a recent Midlands Voices.
Nobody here would benefit from the chaos, lawlessness and pollution that outside forces wrought on North Dakota during the Dakota Access Pipeline debate and subsequent protests. About 40 of the 670 people arrested were from North Dakota, authorities there told The World-Herald’s Paul Hammel this month.
People on all sides should listen to the sound counsel from local protest organizers and supporters and resist the urge to let passions get the better of them. Instead, engage in the process.
Nebraskans have a process in place to hear from landowners, stakeholders and interested Nebraskans during this debate over a proposed 275-mile pipeline route before the state’s PSC.
The PSC is weighing another application from pipeline operator TransCanada to carry tar sands oil to market. The route could be approved. It could be rejected. Or it could be moved.
Supporters of the proposed pipeline route to carry oil from Canada through Steele City, Nebraska, and down to Louisiana still say the pipeline safely boosts our national energy security and jobs by trading with a friendly neighbor.
Opponents worry about the pipeline route’s threat to Nebraskans’ private property rights and the risk that spills could pose to water tables.
Impassioned disagreement on the pipeline issue is legitimate. So is strong debate.
What’s important now is that Midlanders show the world another way to disagree, a responsible way — our way.
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Montana tribes fight Keystone XL pipeline, revived by Trump.
Tribal members are trying to negotiate with TransCanada to reroute the pipeline downstream of their water supply.
Members of the Sioux and Assiniboine tribes of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in Northeast Montana are trying to negotiate with energy company TransCanada to reroute the Keystone XL pipeline downstream of their drinking water source after past oil drilling destroyed their reservation's aquifer.
The Fort Peck reservation is bordered on the south by the Missouri River, with its tribal seat of Poplar and larger city of Wolf Point sitting just off the banks. A quarter-mile west of the reservation's southwest corner, where the Milk River meets the Missouri, is where TransCanada has acquired state and federal permits for Alberta tar sands oil to ford the river through the Keystone XL pipeline.
Tribal members say the pipeline's proposed route is endangered by an old dam spillway and threatens their only source of fresh water from an intake plant 40 miles downstream to the east in Wolf Point, which state and local agencies didn't take into account when issuing permits.
The water intake plant and the network it feeds only came online recently, and supplies drinking and irrigation water to 30,000 people on the two-million-acre reservation and in surrounding communities. The need for what's known as the Fort Peck Dry Prairie Regional Water System stems from oil companies dumping millions of gallons of wastewater on the reservation for decades, poisoning the groundwater.
Margaret Abbott moved to the Fort Peck reservation in the Sixties and dug a well for a country home.
"We had fairly decent water up until about the Nineties," says Abbott, now 73.
That's when Abbott and her neighbors started noticing changes. Their gardens died. The tap water got salty. When Abbott went to retrieve her pasturing horses, she noticed standing water in subzero temperatures.
Abbott and her neighbors lived next to the East Poplar Oil Field, a petroleum patch adjacent the Bakken shale fields first drilled by the Murphy Oil Corporation in the Fifties and tapped again in the Eighties. Pumping oil out of the ground pumps up even more water, and the oil below Fort Peck is saltier than the ocean.
In a 28-page article published in 2013, journalist Kelly Conde details how Murphy dumped 42 million gallons of wastewater brine into unlined pits between 1952 and 1955, and the further polluting that followed.
Other wastewater was injected into underground wells, as is required today – which, combined with abandoned waste wells, progressively leaked into the groundwater as a benzene-rich saline plume, ruining the surrounding aquifer.
Benzene is a carcinogen, and Abbott has beaten breast cancer twice. Plenty of her neighbors are survivors as well, but their lawyers said pinning a cancer cluster on the oil company's water pollution was too difficult.
The tribe went to Congress, which in 2000 passed the Fort Peck Rural Water System Act to ensure safe water for Fort Peck and the surrounding counties through an eventual $300 million water pipeline from the Missouri River.
Some tribal members drank bottled water for decades. Abbott and a dozen other families sued the oil companies in federal court, reaching a settlement in 2002 for a water pipeline to connect affected homes to Poplar's water supply. Abbott says the pipeline broke all the time.
In 2004, construction was completed on the water-intake facility on the Missouri, and by 2009 the plume had reached Poplar. In 2012, Poplar received its first water from the system, and most of the Fort Peck Dry Prairie Rural Water Supply System was up and running across the reservation and neighboring counties by 2015.
"It's been great; we haven't had a break. It's just amazing. So we were breathing a sigh of relief about that, and then Keystone got approved," Abbott says.
Abbott isn't confident Keystone can be stopped at this point, with the new Trump administration gung-ho about it and the petrodollars behind it.
"Oh, what the hell, just do it to the Indians: I'm afraid that's just a lot of people's attitudes," Abbott says.
One of the people trying to stop, reroute or delay the pipeline is Fort Peck tribal civil rights attorney and Rural Water Supply System board member Bob McAnally.
McAnally calls the pipeline a "false need" and says promises of jobs, tax revenue, environmental safety and even President Trump's campaign pledge to build Keystone XL from American steel are malarkey.
"It's been a trail of lies, not only from the administration to us the tribes, but from the pipeline itself," he says.
None of this surprises McAnally, and while he believes fighting Keystone XL may ultimately be futile, his people nonetheless have a spiritual obligation to protect the Missouri, something he wants Montana politicians to understand and value in negotiations.
"Being the first tribe in the United States that they encounter, we feel that it is our duty, in fact our mandate, to put up a legal resistance," McAnally says.
TransCanada pulled out of a March 16th meeting with the tribal executive board after protesters picketed the tribe's headquarters, but company representatives later spoke with the tribal leaders, members of the water board and their attorneys over the phone. McAnally said they presented their case to the TransCanada representatives, but soon realized the pipeline company had only sent a PR staffer and his assistant.
Another meeting has been tentatively planned with TransCanada, though McAnally says the details haven't been worked out yet. The tribes plan on presenting the company with three possible alternate routes for Keystone XL that variously go through or around the reservation but all cross the Missouri downstream of the water-intake plant.
When asked about the status of the Fort Peck tribes' proposed alternate pipeline routes, TransCanada spokesman Matthew John did not answer, stating that TransCanada is "committed to ongoing engagement with Tribal Nations" as the project moves forward, and that the Montana Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) signed off on its permits in 2012.
McAnally says TransCanada has told the tribes the oil project will be perfectly safe – something they've heard before – yet couldn't give them any information on what would happen regarding cleaning up leaks.
"And they're supposed to be the ones with the amazing pipeline," he says.
McAnally says tar sands spilling into the Missouri River would be catastrophic to Fort Peck's environment and economy, destroying decades of work on their agricultural irrigation system.
"We'd have to rebuild the entire plant," he says.
McAnally says the water board's position is that the final environmental impact statement TransCanada gave the U.S. Department of State in 2014 is "completely faulty."
Much like the environmental impact statement accepted by MDEQ in 2012, TransCanada's permit application doesn't address Fort Peck's water at all, primarily concerning itself with the effect on migratory bird habitats and fisheries.
"It's faulty because they barely mentioned our water plant. They failed to recognize the danger," McAnally says.
A coalition of the Northern Plains Resource Council, the Sierra Club and other environmental groups sued TransCanada in Great Falls federal court in March to block Keystone XL on the basis of an inadequate environmental impact study. McAnally says the Fort Peck tribes have been invited to join the lawsuit, but they have not yet decided if they will.
Speaking through a spokesperson, MDEQ Director Tom Livers says the threat to Fort Peck and northeast Montana's water system "were not identified as an issue during scoping, in public comments or in the Tribal consultation process."
Livers says the surface and groundwater analysis impact zone was only a mile out, far from the 40 miles between the pipeline's proposed route and the water-intake plant.
In 2011 and 2015, oil pipeline spills on tributaries of the Missouri in Eastern Montana downstream of Fort Peck led the tribal executive board to pass a resolution opposing Keystone XL for the damage it could do to their water system.
"Given DEQ's recent experience with pipeline spills and public water supplies, if we were starting this analysis today, we would likely specifically consider potential impacts to the system intake in the event of a pipeline spill, despite the intake's distance from the proposed crossing," Livers says.
"Similarly, given heightened awareness of pipelines and water systems, it's likely these issues would surface today in scoping, public comment and/or tribal consultation," he says.
Livers says MDEQ's experience with the 2011 spill did lead to the department's new requirement of directional drilling and additional shutoff valves at pipeline river crossings like the one planned adjacent Fort Peck.
On the other side of Keystone XL's proposed Missouri River crossing and aimed directly at the future pipeline sits the spillway for the six-trillion-gallon reservoir contained by the 77-year-old Fort Peck Dam.
Record flooding in 2011 damaged the dam and prompted a controlled release of 50,000 cubic feet of water per second from the floodway for over a month, which damaged the spillway gates and eroded areas downstream.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers projected $225 million to repair and bolster the dam and the spillway but could only afford $46 million.
While the tribal government seeks to prevent construction of Keystone XL on its current route through the courts, water protectors embittered by their loss at Standing Rock are organizing on the Fort Peck Reservation to oppose the pipeline in the streets.
The family home of one of Abbott's students sits on a natural well north of Wolf Point not yet polluted by the migrating saline plume and unconnected to the rural water network. Tressa Welch says that although her family could hook up to the water network, they won't, as the water's integrity has been compromised by Keystone XL.
"I'm against the pipeline because it threatens my way of life, and if you threaten my way of life, you threaten me," the 26-year-old says.
Welch was part of the demonstrations on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation against the Dakota Access Pipeline, which was rerouted to just above the reservation after residents of the 92-percent white city of Bismarck felt their water was threatened when the pipe crossed the Missouri upstream of them.
Now Welch is one of the organizers of Fort Peck Oyate, the tribal group of a few dozen protesters whose peaceful action scared off TransCanada negotiators from the executive board meeting using an old Dakota Access protest sign repurposed to read "KILL THE BLACK SNAKE STOP THE KXL PIPELINE." (McAnally speculates TransCanada wasn't actually scared off, but simply wasn't prepared and took the protest as an excuse not to meet.)
The group – which only decided on their name on April 11th – organized a prayer walk across the 40 miles of U.S. Route 2 paralleling the Missouri to Keystone XL's proposed river crossing. Welch's two-year-old daughter was the youngest marcher.
Fort Peck Oyate's next march is planned for April 22nd, and will bisect the reservation from the Canadian border in the north to the Missouri's banks. Welch says anyone willing to peacefully participate should march.
As negotiations with TransCanada are ongoing and possible construction still a ways off, Welch says the group's goal for the time being is to raise awareness in the tribal community to the threat the pipeline poses.
"A lot of people are uninformed here," Welch says.
Though the executive board tells its constituents it opposes construction of the pipeline, its meetings with TransCanada have been closed, which Welch says makes the board's sincerity hard to believe.
Welch doesn't want the pipeline rerouted downstream of the intake plant – she wants construction terminated, as any river crossing threatens communities downstream.
"I'm against the Black Snake entirely," she says.
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Last stand: Nebraska farmers could derail Keystone XL pipeline.
When President Donald Trump handed TransCanada Pipeline Co. a permit for its Keystone XL pipeline last month, he said the company could now build the long-delayed and divisive project "with efficiency and with speed."
By Valerie Volcovici | NELIGH, NEBRASKA
When President Donald Trump handed TransCanada Pipeline Co. a permit for its Keystone XL pipeline last month, he said the company could now build the long-delayed and divisive project "with efficiency and with speed."
But Trump and the firm will have to get through Nebraska farmer Art Tanderup first, along with about 90 other landowners in the path of the pipeline.
They are mostly farmers and ranchers, making a last stand against the pipeline - the fate of which now rests with an obscure state regulatory board, the Nebraska Public Service Commission.
The group is fine-tuning an economic argument it hopes will resonate better in this politically conservative state than the environmental concerns that dominated the successful push to block Keystone under former President Barack Obama.
Backed by conservation groups, the Nebraska opponents plan to cast the project as a threat to prime farming and grazing lands - vital to Nebraska's economy - and a foreign company's attempt to seize American private property.
They contend the pipeline will provide mainly temporary jobs that will vanish once construction ends, and limited tax revenues that will decline over time.
They face a considerable challenge. Supporters of the pipeline as economic development include Republican Governor, Pete Ricketts, most of the state’s senators, its labor unions and chamber of commerce.
"It’s depressing to start again after Obama rejected the pipeline two years ago, but we need keep our coalition energized and strong," said Tanderup, who grows rye, corn and soybeans on his 160-acre property.
Now Tanderup and others are gearing up for another round of battle - on a decidedly more local stage, but with potentially international impact on energy firms and consumers.
The latest Keystone XL showdown underscores the increasingly well-organized and diverse resistance to pipelines nationwide, which now stretches well beyond the environmental movement.
Last year, North Dakota's Standing Rock Sioux, a Native American tribe, galvanized national opposition to the Energy Transfer Partners Dakota Access Pipeline. Another ETP pipeline in Louisiana has drawn protests from flood protection advocates and commercial fishermen.
The Keystone XL pipeline would cut through Tanderup's family farm, near the two-story farmhouse built in the 1920s by his wife Helen's grandfather.
The Tanderups have plastered the walls with aerial photos of three "#NoKXL" crop art installations they staged from 2014 to 2016. Faded signs around the farm still advertise the concert Willie Nelson and Neil Young played here in 2014 to raise money for the protests.
The stakes for the energy industry are high as the Keystone XL combatants focus on Nebraska, especially for Canadian producers that have struggled for decades to move more of that nation's landlocked oil reserves to market. Keystone offers a path to get heavy crude from the Canada oil sands to refiners on the U.S. Gulf Coast equipped to handle it.
TransCanada has route approval in all of the U.S. states the line will cross except Nebraska, where the company says it has been unable to negotiate easements with landowners on about 9 percent of the 300-mile crossing.
So the dispute now falls to Nebraska's five-member utility commission, an elected board with independent authority over TransCanada’s proposed route.
The commission has scheduled a public hearing in May, along with a week of testimony by pipeline supporters and opponents in August. Members face a deadline set by state law to take a vote by November.
"TENS OF THOUSANDS" OF JOBS
TransCanada has said on its website that the pipeline would create "tens of thousands" of jobs and tens of millions in tax dollars for the three states it would cross - Montana, South Dakota and Nebraska.
TransCanada declined to comment in response to Reuters inquiries seeking a more precise number and description of the jobs, including the proportion of them that are temporary - for construction - versus permanent.
Trump has been more specific, saying the project would create 28,000 U.S. jobs. But a 2014 State Department study predicted just 3,900 construction jobs and 35 permanent jobs.
Asked about the discrepancy, White House spokeswoman Kelly Love did not explain where Trump came up with his 28,000 figure, but pointed out that the State Department study also estimates that the pipeline would indirectly create thousands of additional jobs.
The study indicates those jobs would be temporary, including some 16,100 at firms with contracts for goods and services during construction, and another 26,000, depending on how workers from the original jobs spend their wages.
TransCanada estimates that state taxes on the pipeline and pumping stations would total $55.6 million across the three states during the first year.
The firm will pay property taxes on the pumping stations along the route, but not the land. It would pay a different - and lower - "personal property" tax on the pipeline itself, said Brian Jorde, a partner in the Omaha-based law firm Domina Law Group, which represents the opposition.
The personal property taxes, he said, would decline over a seven-year period and eventually disappear.
TRUMP: 'I'll CALL NEBRASKA'
The Nebraska utilities commission faces tremendous political pressure from well beyond the state it regulates.
"The commissioners know it is game time, and everybody is looking," said Jane Kleeb, Nebraska's Democratic party chair and head of the conservation group Bold Alliance, which is coordinating resistance from the landowners, Native American tribes and environmental groups.
The alliance plans to target the commissioners and their electoral districts with town halls, letter-writing campaigns, and billboards.
During the televised ceremony where Trump awarded the federal permit for the pipeline, he promised to weigh in on the Nebraska debate.
"Nebraska? I'll call Nebraska," he said after TransCanada Chief Executive Russell Girling said the company faced opposition there.
Love, the White House spokeswoman, said she did not know if Trump had called Nebraska officials.
The commission members - one Democrat and four Republicans - have ties to a wide range of conflicting interests in the debate, making it difficult to predict their decision.
According to state filings, one of the commissioners, Democrat Crystal Rhoades, is a member of the Sierra Club - an environmental group opposing the pipeline.
Another, Republican Rod Johnson, has a long history of campaign donations from oil and gas firms.
The others are Republicans with ties to the farming and ranching sectors - including one member that raises cattle in an area near where the pipeline would cross.
All five members declined requests for comment.
PREPPING THE WITNESSES
TransCanada has been trying since 2008 to build the 1,100-mile line - from Hardisty, Alberta to Steele City, Nebraska, where it would connect to a network feeding the Midwest and Gulf Coast refining regions. The firm had its federal permit application rejected in 2015 by the Obama administration.
Opponents want the pipeline, if not rejected outright, to be re-routed well away from Nebraska's Sandhills region, named for its sandy soil, which overlies one of the largest freshwater aquifers in the United States.
The Ogallala aquifer supplies large-scale crop irrigation and cattle-watering operations.
“It all comes down to water,” said Terry Steskal, whose family farm lies in the pipeline's path.
Steskal dug his boot into the ground on his property, kicking up sand to demonstrate his biggest concern about the pipeline. If the pipeline leaks, oil can easily seep through the region's porous soil into the water, which lies near the surface.
TransCanada spokesman Terry Cunha said the company has a good environmental record with its existing Keystone pipeline network in Nebraska, which runs east of the proposed Keystone XL.
The company, however, has reported at least two big pipeline spills in other states since 2011, including some 400 barrels of oil spilled in South Dakota last year.
The Domina Law Group is helping the opposition by preparing the landowners, including the Tanderups and Steskals, for the August hearings, much as they would prepare witnesses for trial.
If the route is approved, Jorde said the firm plans to file legal challenges, potentially challenging TransCanada's right to use eminent domain law to seize property.
Eminent domain allows for the government to expropriate private land in the public interest. But Jorde said he thinks TransCanada would struggle to meet that threshold in Nebraska.
"Some temporary jobs and some taxes is not enough to win the public interest argument," he said.
(Additional reporting by Ethan Lou in Calgary; Editing by Richard Valdmanis and Brian Thevenot)
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Groups file suit to halt Keystone XL pipeline.
Native American groups as well as environmental advocates are challenging the State Department's approval, based on its about-face on the environmental impact.
Several environmental and Native American advocacy groups have filed two separate lawsuits against the State Department over its approval of the Keystone XL pipeline.
The Sierra Club, Northern Plains Resource Council, Bold Alliance, Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Earth, and the Natural Resources Defense Council filed a federal lawsuit in Montana on Thursday, challenging the State Department's border-crossing permit and related environmental reviews and approvals.
The suit came on the heels of a related suit against the State Department and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service filed by the Indigenous Environmental Network and North Coast Rivers Alliance in the same court on Monday.
The State Department issued a permit for the project, a pipeline that would carry tar sands crude oil from Canada to Nebraska, on March 24. Regulators in Nebraska must still review the proposed route there.
The State Department and TransCanada, the company proposing to build the pipeline, declined to comment.
The suit filed by the environmental groups argues that the State Department relied solely on an outdated and incomplete environmental impact statement completed in January 2014. That assessment, the groups argue, failed to properly account for the pipeline's threats to the climate, water resources, wildlife and communities along the pipeline route.
"In their haste to issue a cross-border permit requested by TransCanada Keystone Pipeline L.P. (TransCanada), Keystone XL's proponent, Defendants United States Department of State (State Department) and Under Secretary of State Shannon have violated the National Environmental Policy Act and other law and ignored significant new information that bears on the project's threats to the people, environment, and national interests of the United States," the suit states. "They have relied on an arbitrary, stale, and incomplete environmental review completed over three years ago, for a process that ended with the State Department's denial of a crossborder permit."
"The Keystone XL pipeline is nothing more than a dirty and dangerous proposal thats time has passed," Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune said in a statement. "It was rightfully rejected by the court of public opinion and President Obama, and now it will be rejected in the court system."
The suit filed by the Native American groups also challenges the State Department's environmental impact statement. They argue it fails to adequately justify the project and analyze reasonable alternatives, adverse impacts and mitigation measures. The suit claims the assessment was "irredeemably tainted" because it was prepared by Environmental Management, a company with a "substantial conflict of interest."
"President Trump is breaking established environmental laws and treaties in his efforts to force through the Keystone XL Pipeline, that would bring carbon-intensive, toxic, and corrosive crude oil from the Canadian tar sands, but we are filing suit to fight back," Tom Goldtooth, executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network said in a statement. "For too long, the U.S. Government has pushed around Indigenous peoples and undervalued our inherent rights, sovereignty, culture, and our responsibilities as guardians of Mother Earth and all life while fueling catastrophic extreme weather and climate change with an addiction to fossil fuels."
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