Trump Approves Keystone XL, Dakota Access Pipelines To Streamline Future Oil Spills

WASHINGTON. Seated at the Resolute Desk on his fourth full day in office, President Donald J. Trump signed a pair of executive memoranda Tuesday reviving the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, clearing the final regulatory hurdles standing between North American crude oil and the drinking water it had long been kept from.

"From now on we're going to start making pipe in the United States," Trump said as he signed the documents, adding that the projects would generate "a lot of jobs, 28,000 jobs," a figure aides clarified referred to temporary construction positions, roughly 35 of which would still exist once the pipelines were finished.

The first memorandum invited TransCanada to resubmit its application for the Keystone XL line, which President Obama had rejected in 2015 on the grounds that it would worsen the climate crisis. The second directed the Army Corps of Engineers to expedite the Dakota Access pipeline, routing it beneath Lake Oahe and the Missouri River just upstream of the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, whose months-long protest over threats to its water supply and treaty land was thereby resolved in favor of the oil.

"The President felt strongly that the crude and the aquifer had spent too long apart," said one administration official, who described the signings as an effort to reintroduce two parties with a great deal in common. "Lake Oahe is right there. The oil is right there. At a certain point you stop asking why they were not allowed to mix and you start asking why anyone ever said they couldn't."

Officials took pains to note the decision was reached with full transparency, observing that Trump's own 2016 financial disclosures had listed a holding in Energy Transfer Partners, the company building the Dakota Access line, a stake his spokesman said had been sold months earlier, settling the question permanently and to everyone's satisfaction. The chief executive of Energy Transfer Partners, who had donated generously to Trump's campaign and inaugural committee, was reported to be pleased that the matter could at last move forward strictly on the merits.

At press time, Trump was reviewing a map of the continental United States to determine which remaining rivers had gone the longest without a pipeline beneath them.