Senator will file amendment to Keystone bill today

WASHINGTON (January 13, 2015) – For years, the oil industry has been touting the Keystone XL pipeline’s benefits for North American energy security. Today Senator Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) will file an amendment to the Senate bill that forces approval of the pipeline. The amendment would call the industry’s bluff by requiring that all oil and refined product derived from the Canadian tar sands transported through the Keystone pipeline would stay in the United States. Senator Markey has offered this amendment previously in the House of Representatives.

“America is being asked to build this Canadian oil pipeline and assume all the environmental risk, including the damage to our climate, but then we’re supposed to accept that some of this oil will be exported to foreign markets. America should not be a middleman between dirty foreign oil and thirsty foreign markets, just so oil companies can make more profits,” said Senator Markey, a member of the Environment and Public Works Committee. “The oil industry has said this is about energy security, but I am calling their bluff. This vote will put my colleagues and the oil industry on record over whether they want to keep the oil here for American consumers, businesses and our national security, or continue our dependence on foreign oil.”

Previously, then-Representative Markey challenged TransCanada on this question at a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee in December 2011. There he asked Alexander Pourbaix, TransCanada's President of Energy and Oil Pipelines, whether he would commit to including a requirement in TransCanada's long-term contracts with Gulf Coast refineries, as a condition of shipping, that all refined fuels produced from oil transported through the Keystone XL pipeline be sold in the United States. In response, Mr. Pourbaix stated "no, I can’t do that."