Canada to Obama: We're Going to Go Ahead and Build a Big Chunk of Our Pipeline Anyway

Canada's talking tough:

TransCanada Corp. said Monday it plans to begin building a major portion of the Keystone XL oil sands pipeline despite the Obama administration's decision to reject a key permit for the project.

The company told the State Department in a letter Monday that it will begin construction of a section of the pipeline that runs from Cushing, Okla., to refineries on the Gulf Coast. The stand-alone portion of the project, which TransCanada dubbed the Gulf Coast Project, will cost $2.3 billion and will be completed in mid-to-late 2013, according to the company. The project must still receive other regulatory approvals.

Separately, TransCanada said it would reapply "in the near future" for a permit that would allow the Keystone XL pipeline to cross from Alberta, Canada, into the United States.

The Oklahoma-to-Texas portion of the pipeline would carry crude oil pumped from land in the Midwest and surrounding areas to refineries in Texas. It would not carry Canadian oil sands.

The White House said Monday that it supports TransCanada's bid to build the Oklahoma-to-Texas portion of the pipeline, adding that the project "will help address the bottleneck of oil in Cushing that has resulted in large part from increased domestic oil production, currently at an eight year high.

It could be that Canada is reading the tea leaves and seeing how unpopular Obama's blockade of this pipeline is and figures one way or other it's going to get built. Either Obama backs down or the next president will greenlight it.  Might as well get as much of it done as possible so when the Canadian oil is okayed for import the infrastructure will be there to handle it.