Ratings agency Moody's predicted Monday that the Obama administration would eventually approve TransCanada's application to build the controversial Keystone XL pipeline.
"But approval will not be quick," Moody's Investor Service said in a report on fallout from the US presidential election. "A prolonged permitting process risks missing the very oil price boom that inspired Keystone XL in the first place."
Gulf Coast oil refiners and marketers stand to benefit from light/heavy crude price differentials as long as the project's permitting process and construction timeline lets TransCanada put the system into operation by 2015 or 2016, Moody's said.
In January, President Barack Obama rejected TransCanada's first application to build Keystone XL, blaming a 60-day deadline imposed on the permitting process by pipeline supporters in Congress.
TransCanada filed a new application in May. It calls for a 36-inch-diameter pipeline running 329 miles from Hardisty, Alberta, to Monchy, Saskatchewan, where it would hit the US border. The next 850-mile section would run from Phillips County, Montana, to Steele City, Nebraska, where it would link with the existing Keystone pipeline to Cushing, Oklahoma. The $5.3 billion project would carry 830,000 b/d, according to the company.
TransCanada is building the $2.3 billion southern segment, dubbed the Gulf Coast Project, from Cushing, Oklahoma, to Nederland, Texas, while it waits for a State Department permit for the section that crosses the US-Canada border.
