State's GOP congressmen blast Biden's Keystone pipeline decision

Posted at 12:30 p.m. on Thursday, January 21, 2021

The Brillion News

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Wisconsin's five Republican U.S. Congressmen on Thursday, January 21, blasted President Joe Biden for his plans to derail the Keystone XL pipeline.

Congressmen Glenn Grothman, Mike Gallagher, Bryan Steil, Tom Tiffany and Scott Fitzgerald sent a letter to Biden expressing their support for completion of the construction of the pipeline.

The GOP congressmen said the Keystone XL pipeline would transport 830,000 barrels of oil per day, support 11,000 U.S. jobs and lower the price of gas at the pump.

TC Energy, the company responsible for operating the pipeline, has also pledged that the Keystone XL pipeline would be carbon-neutral by the year 2023.

Despite this, and push-back from Jason Kenney, Premier of the Canadian province of Alberta where the pipeline begins, Biden has chosen to stop the project.

The Keystone pipeline system is currently made up of four phases that have been completed in steps since 2010.

Construction of the final phase, commonly known as Keystone XL, was halted by the Obama administration, restarted by the Trump administration and will be again shut down by the Biden administration.

The proposed XL route, shown in red in the map to the left, is intended to deliver Canadian crude oil to the upper Midwest state in the U.S.

Congressman Grothman called Biden's plans to kill the project "radical."

“Joe Biden ran his campaign with the promise to govern as a moderate, but he has broken that promise on the first day of his Presidency with the radical step of shutting down construction of the Keystone XL pipeline,” said Grothman. “With the stroke of his pen, he has stifled 11,000 high-paying jobs, further reduced the amount of oil imported into the U.S. and has cancelled the hope of gas prices going down at the pump. This is a sad day for working Americans and a sad day for those who believed they voted for a moderate President.”

Gallagher asked the Biden Administration to reconsider blocking the pipeline project: "Halting construction of this project not only hurts our economy, but undermines American energy independence and drives up costs for working-class Americans. This is a step in the wrong direction and I urge the Biden Administration to reconsider.”

The letter to Biden appealed to the president's ties to labor unions.

The letter said, in part:

"Keystone XL has committed to complete the project using union labor, creating thousands of union jobs, including more than 7,000 American union jobs in 2021 alone. Keystone XL has also committed to investing more than $10 million to create a Green Jobs Training Fund to help train union workers for jobs on a growing number of renewable energy projects expected in the coming years and become the first pipeline to be fully powered by renewable energy."