The White House told POLITICO yesterday (March 2) that the Keystone XL Pipeline would not be required to use U.S.-made steel.
However, a January 24 presidential memo stated that all “all new pipelines, as well as retrofitted, repaired, or expanded pipelines” must be made with American steel.
“The Keystone XL Pipeline is currently in the process of being constructed, so it does not count as a new, retrofitted, repaired or expanded pipeline,” the White House spokeswoman clarified in the POLITICO interview.
Yet President Donald Trump did appear to suggest on January 26, per this CNBC video, that the Keystone XL, as well as the Dakota Access Pipeline, would be built with steel fabricated in the United States.
He also hinted at it during his joint address to Congress earlier this week, on February 28, when Trump discussed the two oil projects and the pipeline directive in the same sentence. As The Washington Post clarified, however, TransCanada had already purchased all the steel pipe it needed for its 1,178-mile long pipeline from Italy, India and a Russian-owned plant in Canada, as the company noted in 2013.
The Dakota Access is nearly complete, and DeSmog Blog speculates its pipe might also come from Evraz, the same Russian-owned plant in Canada. Energy Transfer Partners, the company behind Dakota Access, did confirm to DeSmog that some pipe was Canadian-made.