Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is raising the possibility of resurrecting the corpse of the Keystone XL pipeline as a centerpiece of his administration’s energy policy if he is elected president this November.Speaking with Elon Musk on Monday, Trump criticized US president Joe Biden for cancelling the 1,947 km conduit from Hardisty to Steele City, NB on his first day in office. If built, it would have employed about 48,000 union workers and pumped another 830,000 barrels per day of Alberta crude to the Gulf of Mexico.."One of the first thing he did is that he shut down the Keystone XL pipeline, which is our pipeline that would've employed 48,000 people – pipeline workers," he told Musk. “He shuts it down. That was a massive job that Obama refused to allow." "I allowed it in my first week because it was jobs and it moved oil. And by the way, in a much more environmentally friendly way, it's underground, it's not a truck that catches on fire or a train that catches on fire."He repeated the comments in a rambling press conference in New Jersey on Thursday where he accused ‘Crooked Joe’ of approving the Nordstream pipeline from Russia while “killing” Keystone XL.“He did the exact opposite of what he should have done,” Trump said. “We’re going to drill, baby, drill.”.Trump accused presumptive Democratic nominee Kamala Harris of aiming to ban fracking and moving to ’outlaw’ oil and gas to appease environmentalists.Although Trump didn’t say he would approve KXL on his first day in office he can’t because TC Energy cancelled it out right in June of 2021.And it’s not entirely clear if it would want to after its $15 billion claim against the US government under the old NAFTA treaty — which Trump was adamantly opposed to — was tossed by a trade tribunal last month.It still may not be the final nail, however, given that the Alberta government is filing its own NAFTA claim to recover a $1.3 billion equity investment in the line made under former premier Jason Kenney.Even present Premier Danielle Smith has held out hope the line will eventually be built if Trump is returned to power..Speaking in an exclusive interview with the Western Standard last February, she expressed hope it will oneself again be resurrected after receiving support from US lawmakers during a tour of Washington DC.“Is it dead forever? I don't know. I mean, that was another instance of us looking at all that hard work had been done on that routing. Is there any chance that we'd be able to do a restart or a conversation on that project?” she said. “With the Democrats? Very unlikely, but with the Republicans very likely — so it's not not 100% dead. So we'll just have to see how the American politics play out.”Western Standard has reached out to TC Energy for comment.
