Keystone XL's first hurdle passed

The challenges are not over for the pipeline which will run from Alberta to the Gulf Coast

When the Keystone XL pipeline was first proposed more than eight years ago, Russ Girling, TransCanada's chief executive (he was chief operating officer at the time), probably didn't imagine the bruising battles ahead, or that it would be President Donald Trump signing off on the project's presidential permit in 2017. But Girling was positively beaming as he watched Trump announce the approval of the permit in a 24 March Oval Office ceremony. That Trump signed off on the line—which would move as much as 830,000 barrels a day of oil sands crude from Alberta to the Gulf Coast—wasn't a surprise, coming at the end of a self-imposed 60-day reevaluation period in which the verdict was never in doub