TransCanada wins right to use Texas land for Keystone pipeline
Bloomberg News | Sep 28, 2012 6:21 PM ET | Last Updated: Sep 28, 2012 6:23 PM ET
TransCanada/Handout Calgary-based TransCanada was awarded possession of disputed easements after the company agreed to post adequate surety bonds against potential damages, as required under state law.
TransCanada Corp. won court permission to build part of its Keystone XL pipeline across several contested tracts of southeast Texas farmland to carry Canadian oil sands crude to Gulf Coast refineries.
State judge Tom Rugg Sr. granted the pipeline company’s requests to take possession of the tracts under state eminent- domain laws after a hearing today in Beaumont, Texas.
“The statutory requirements for the issuance of writs of possession are now met,” Rugg said in a two-page ruling, after TransCanada agreed to increase the size and type of surety bonds it posted in the proceeding.
The landowners urged Rugg to deny TransCanada’s access to the disputed tracts, citing a Texas Supreme Court ruling last year that limits the condemnation powers that pipelines can use under state law.
Rugg told lawyers in a letter this week that he wouldn’t hear the landowners’ challenges under the new high-court standards at this stage of the proceedings. A Texas appeals court is scheduled to hear arguments next week that rely on the ruling in a separate eminent-domain case against the Keystone XL pipeline.
Disputed Easements
Rugg gave Calgary-based TransCanada possession of the disputed easements after the company agreed to post adequate surety bonds against potential damages, as required under state law. Rugg temporarily blocked the pipeline company from accessing one of the disputed parcels until all owners of that land received the proper legal notice of the eminent domain proceeding.
One of the landowners, David Holland, claimed in court filings that the bonds TransCanada posted this month were inadequate. He said the bond for his property represented less than 5% of the price TransCanada offered him before negotiations broke down.
The bonds are based on assessed value of the property that’s used for the easement as set by an independent county commission.
Holland said he rejected TransCanada’s offer of US$446,864 for an easement primarily because the company refused to accept liability for any future disaster and wouldn’t lower the Keystone XL to pass under existing streams and heavy-equipment crossings on the property. He said TransCanada’s refusal of “customary easement terms” made the Keystone XL more environmentally risky than other pipelines that had accepted his terms to gain easements across the farm.
Eminent Domain
Tom Zabal, TransCanada’s lawyer, argued in court filings that the pipeline didn’t need court permission to take possession of the easements because the company fulfilled all requirements of Texas’s eminent-domain statute. He said the pipeline sought the writs of possession to reinforce Keystone’s legal rights in case landowners tried to block pipeline crews from reaching the easements.
In an interview before the hearing, Holland said he will continue fighting TransCanada on principal, just as he did in a different eminent-domain dispute with another pipeline. In that case against a unit of Denbury Resources Inc., Holland took the case to the Texas Supreme Court, where he won the ruling activists hope will help derail the Keystone XL in an appeal involving an unrelated tract.
The case is TransCanada Keystone Pipeline LP v. Texas Rice Land Partners Ltd., 0118867, County Court at Law, Jefferson County, Texas (Beaumont).
More Pipeline Piffle (And An Alaskan Absurdity) Posted on March 30, 2012
The misleading assault on the president’s energy policies continues.
* A conservative group’s TV ad claims “we will all pay more at the pump” because the administration “blocked” the Keystone XL pipeline.
* Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell claims that the pipeline “could have brought 700,000 barrels of oil to the market each day.”
* The TV ad also claims that Obama “opposed exploring for energy in Alaska,” which is only half true.
All those claims are false or misleading. Regarding the pipeline, as we’ve reported, there’s nothing stopping more Canadian oil from coming into the U.S. right now. Existing cross-border pipelines could carry perhaps 1 million additional barrels of oil per day, and surplus capacity is projected to persist for years to come even without the Keystone project.
Furthermore, Obama hasn’t “blocked” it. The Keystone’s sponsor says it expects the White House to approve the northern leg, from Hardisty, Alberta, to Steele City, Nebraska, in 2013, after it submits an application for a new route around Nebraska’s environmentally sensitive Sandhills region. Meanwhile, it is going ahead with the southern portion, which Obama has endorsed, ordering agencies to expedite permitting.
As for the claim that Obama “opposed exploring for energy in Alaska.” The truth is that Shell Oil days ago said it expects to begin drilling exploratory wells this summer in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas off Alaska’s Arctic coast, now that the Interior Department has granted approvals for the company’s oil spill response plans.
[...]
Old Oil Claims
The TV ad also contains several claims that we have already vetted and written about. Among them:
* “[Obama] gave millions of tax dollars to Solyndra, which then went bankrupt.” It’s true .. http://www.factcheck.org/2011/10/obamas-solyndra-problem/ .. that the Obama administration loaned $535 million to Solyndra, a solar energy company that has since filed for bankruptcy. But what does that have to do with high gasoline prices? Nothing.
* “Obama’s energy secretary said we need to, quote, ‘boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.’ That’s $9 a gallon.” It’s true that Steven Chu said those words. But, as we previously wrote .. http://www.factcheck.org/2012/03/obama-wanted-higher-gasoline-prices/ , Chu made that remark before becoming Obama’s energy secretary and even before Obama won the 2008 presidential election. Not long after becoming energy secretary, Chu said it would be “completely unwise to want to increase the price of gasoline.”
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