Keystone XL Pipeline Seen Moving Ahead on Alternative Route
TransCanada Corp.’s $7 billion Keystone XL oil pipeline still will move ahead with an alternate route after President Barack Obama’s decision to deny a permit, investors, public officials and analysts say.
Obama blamed congressional Republicans yesterday for imposing a deadline on his decision, which he said left no time to approve the project. His administration invited TransCanada to reapply, an overture the Calgary-based company promptly said it would accept.
Denying the permit pushes a final decision on the pipeline into 2013, safely past this year’s presidential election. John Stephenson, who helps manage $2.7 billion for First Asset Management Inc. in Toronto, said he bought 350,000 shares yesterday as TransCanada fell the most in 18 months.
“This is clearly the biggest infrastructure project on the continent, and once the election is settled, we believe it will be approved,” Stephenson said in an interview. “All the waffling just gives people an opportunity to trade around it.”
TransCanada closed yesterday at $41.41, down 0.8 percent in New York trading, after falling as low as $39.74 on news of the president’s decision. That was a decline of 4.8 percent, the most since June 2009.
Yesterday’s decision by the State Department was praised by environmentalists and was decried by the U.S. oil and gas industry and Republican presidential candidates and lawmakers, who had pushed Obama to approve the project as a way create jobs.