TransCanada executive: New Keystone route in weeks

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HOUSTON (AP) — A Canadian company that wants to build a 1,700-mile oil pipeline through the U.S. heartland to the Texas Gulf Coast will be ready within weeks to submit plans for a new route that avoids the environmentally sensitive Nebraska Sandhills region, a TransCanada executive said Tuesday.

TransCanada also plans to begin construction on the pipeline's southern tier from Cushing, Okla., to Texas by late spring or early summer, said Alex Pourbaix, president of TransCanada's energy and oil pipelines division.

The contentious pipeline is designed to bring oil from Canada's tar sands region in Alberta to refineries along the Texas Gulf Coast. The upper portion of the pipeline requires U.S. State Department approval because it crosses an international border, while the southern tier will need standard federal permits that Pourbaix believes will be ready shortly.

The State Department, backed by President Barack Obama, recently rejected the longer project, saying TransCanada needed to find a route that would avoid the Sandhills and the Ogallala Aquifer, a key water source for eight states. At the time, Obama encouraged TransCanada to pursue the southern portion of the pipeline that would, in the short term, relieve a bottleneck of crude at Midwestern refineries.

Pourbaix said that part of the pipeline would be ready by 2013.

“We'll be taking care of that bottleneck between Cushing and the Gulf Coast,” Pourbaix told reporters after speaking on a panel at a Houston energy conference.

That southern tier, he added, would only relieve the problem in the short term. Having that portion ready in advance will also not shorten the two-year construction timeline for the longer pipeline, Pourbaix said, due to the severe winters in the northern United States that prevent construction during those months.

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