New Keystone XL Route: Out of the Sandhills, but Still in the Aquifer
Nebraska landowners say their primary goal to protect the region's water supply was forgotten in the focus only on the Sandhills.
It wasn't that long ago that the people of Holt County, Neb. thought they had made a real impact on national policy.
Their opposition to the Keystone XL oil pipeline led project owner TransCanada to move the pipeline out of the Nebraska Sandhills, a fragile ecosystem that overlies the Ogallala aquifer. The company's release of the new route last week seemed to solidify that victory.
But some local landowners are feeling far from celebratory. They say their primary goal was to protect the Ogallala aquifer, but somewhere along the way, people became so intent on protecting the Sandhills that the true objective was lost.
"Water has always been first and foremost in our mind," said Tom Genung of Hastings, Neb., who owns ranchland in Holt County. "We were promised everything would be okay if [the pipeline] got out of the Sandhills ... but it's not."
TransCanada's new route is currently just a "corridor"—a 2,000-foot wide path that will eventually be whittled down to a narrower route. It is among several possible routes identified in a 54-page report that TransCanada submitted last week to Nebraska's Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), the state agency in charge of the pipeline's environmental review.
http://insideclimatenews.org/news/20120426/keystone-xl-nebraska-sandhills-ogallala%20aquifer-heineman-transcanada?
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