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Nebraskans support construction of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline through the state by more than 2-to-1.

Sixty-one percent approve of the 36-inch-diameter, high-pressure crude oil pipeline, according to The World-Herald Poll, while 28 percent disapprove.

Proponents of the project said they weren’t surprised and called it a signal to move forward.

“I’m hoping that the general public not only recognizes the need for the jobs and energy independence, but also recognizes it can be constructed in an environmentally safe way,” said State Sen. Jim Smith of Papillion, a leading supporter.

But opponents said it was unfair to ask a simple yes-or-no question.

Jane Kleeb of Bold Nebraska, a group opposing the project, said the public’s responses shift when people are provided more specific information.

Concerns grow, she said, when people learn that the Keystone XL will carry an unconventional oil — diluted bitumen steamed out of tar sand deposits — which opponents contend is more corrosive and more dangerous. The pipeline, Kleeb said, still crosses major portions of the Ogallala Aquifer, which provides most of the water for drinking and irrigation in the region.

“We don’t support tar sand pipelines, and we certainly don’t support tar sand pipelines that go through the Ogallala Aquifer for export,” Kleeb said.

In August, a poll of rural residents by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln indicated that 65 percent supported the pipeline, but only if it avoided the Sand Hills and the aquifer.

The World-Herald Poll, conducted Sept. 17 through 20, began 12 days after pipeline developer TransCanada Inc. announced new alterations to the pipeline’s route, mostly to avoid sandy, erodible soils in north-central Nebraska.

The World-Herald’s statewide poll of 800 registered voters had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points. It was conducted by Wiese Research Associates of Omaha.

While the poll showed no difference in support across the state’s three congressional districts, political affiliation sparked differences: 46 percent of Democrats supported the project, with 40 percent opposed. That compared with 70 percent support and 20 percent opposition among Republicans.

Shawn Howard, a spokesman for TransCanada, said support for the pipeline is bipartisan and has risen with the route changes.

He dismissed concerns about tar sand oil, saying about 300 million gallons of such oil has safely crossed Nebraska and the aquifer through the smaller original Keystone pipeline, which began operating two years ago across the eastern part of the state.

Sen. Ken Haar of Malcolm, who led the call for a special session on pipeline issues last year in the Nebraska Legislature, said the results confirm what he hears from constituents: They’re pleased that the project is avoiding the Sand Hills.

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TransCanada Corp. shouldn’t be allowed to use eminent-domain laws to seize land to build the southern leg of its Keystone XL Pipeline near Beaumont, Texas, lawyers for property owners told a judge.

A recent Texas Supreme Court decision may give the landowners the right to prevent TransCanada from taking land for the pipeline, Terry Wood, an attorney for Texas Rice Land Partners, said at a hearing in state court in Beaumont on Wednesday.

That decision limited the ability of pipeline owners to condemn property under certain circumstances. The landowners in Beaumont are fighting to keep Calgary-based TransCanada from immediately entering their properties and starting construction before lawyers and lawmakers have explored what the ruling means.

“This is a case of what’s expedient for the pipeline company versus the constitutional rights of landowners,” Wood told Jefferson County Court at Law Judge Tom Rugg Sr. Wood urged Rugg to stall condemnation of Texas Rice Land’s property.

“You realize you might be asking me to delay the resolution of this case for years,” Rugg told Wood.

“That is a possibility,” Wood replied.

The judge gave lawyers until Sept. 21 to provide additional briefing and promised to rule by Sept. 24.

“I am concerned that the rights of landowners not be trampled unless there’s clear statutory authority to do so,” he said.

Tom Zabel, TransCanada’s lawyer, told Rugg the pipeline operator believes it has the right under an 1899 Texas statute to start construction without obtaining so-called writs of possession through condemnation proceedings such as the ones today in Beaumont. He said the company has filed the appropriate paperwork and posted the required bonds and should be allowed to proceed as pipelines have traditionally done in Texas.

“Once we’ve done that, we’re entitled to the easements we’re seeking. It’s that simple,” Zabel told Rugg. “The Texas Legislature came up with this scheme because it wanted to encourage oil and gas exploitation, and you can’t have oil and gas without pipelines. This is something that’s been determined in Texas for more than 100 years.”

Zabel said the supreme court ruling doesn’t apply to the type of pipeline TransCanada is planning with the Keystone XL.

The ruling, which also involved Texas Rice Land Partners in a lawsuit against a different pipeline, was a “game changer” with statewide implications for pipeline companies, Wood said in an interview after the hearing.

“Before that decision, the pipelines just assumed that, if they said it loud enough and enough times, they had the right” to condemn private property for pipelines, Wood said.

TransCanada began construction last month on part of the 36-inch Keystone XL pipeline, which is designed to bring oil from tar sands of western Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast, Brad Johnson, a company spokesman, said in an interview after the hearing.

The initial stretch of pipeline will connect Cushing, Okla., and Nederland, Texas, he said.

Critics of the Keystone XL claim the ruling also requires that pipelines operate for the public good in order to use eminent domain.

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The case of Julia Trigg Crawford vs. the Keystone XL oil pipeline will soon return to the headlines.

Crawford, a Northeast Texas farmer, is fighting to keep TransCanada, the pipeline owner, from invoking the right of eminent domain to cross her property. A judge in Lamar County ruled against her last month, but Crawford says she plans to appeal soon — probably to the state’s 6th Court of Appeals in Texarkana.

“We feel good about a panel of judges” hearing the case for the court, she says.

Eminent domain rules, the issue at stake in the Crawford case, allow pipelines and other utilities to cross the property of unwilling landowners (who get compensated). Texas has thousands of pipelines, but the Keystone XL has drawn national attention because it would transport an especially dirty form of oil, a prospect that infuriates environmentalists.

But Crawford’s case is only the most visible in what some legal experts describe as a rising tide of property-rights cases across Texas. Last week, the Texas Supreme Court handed down four decisions on land-use issues, including a ruling that allows the city of Austin to take over a downtown block belonging to lawyer Harry Whittington for use as a parking garage and chilling station.

“There is a lot more activity [on property-rights cases] down at the trial court level,” says Renea Hicks, a lawyer who worked the Austin case.

The burst of activity stems from basic economic changes. The hydraulic-fracturing boom has increased oil and gas activity around the state, creating demand for more pipelines that cross private property. The wind-power boom, similarly, has resulted in the construction of major transmission lines in rural areas.

Demographics also play a role, according to Matthew Festa, an associate professor at the South Texas College of Law. Texas’ population is growing quickly, and “the more neighbors you have, the more controversies” arise, he said. That tension is evident in cities as well as rural areas; as an example, Festa cited the long-running clash in Houston over plans to build a 21-story luxury tower, known as the Ashby high-rise, in a residential neighborhood.

Finding patterns in the way the Texas courts rule is more challenging. Partly that’s because the cases often hinge on specifics. “Land-use cases are pretty fact-intensive,” Festa said.

The four property-rights-related Supreme Court decisions released Friday all went against landowners, though they were on different topics. They ranged from the city of Beaumont’s right to demolish a neglected building to a dispute over the admissibility of expert testimony and land values at the site of a natural gas processing facility.

Terry Jacobson, a Corsicana lawyer involved in a case (also decided Friday) involving plans for swampland on the site of a potential future reservoir in Titus County, described it as “Black Friday for pro-property rights.” Some earlier decisions, he said, had gone the other direction.

“Many lawyers who are involved in property-rights litigation had sensed maybe a positive trend in some of the more recent opinions of the court, but the results of last Friday suggest that perhaps our optimism was premature,” Jacobson said.

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A judge in Lamar County, Texas, ruled Wednesday night that TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline has the right of eminent domain, rejecting a plea by farm manager Julia Trigg Crawford and dealing a blow to landowners and environmentalists who have been trying to block construction of the pipeline.

The ruling by Judge Bill Harris removes yet another potential obstacle for TransCanada, which already has permits from the Army Corps of Engineers for the southern leg of the pipeline, which starts in Cushing, Okla., and runs to Port Arthur, Texas. TransCanada has said it will start building as soon as possible.

In March, President Obama endorsed the construction of the southern leg of the pipeline. He said it would alleviate a supply bottleneck at Cushing, where the benchmark price of oil is set for the U.S. market.

But environmental groups and some landowners have been mounting a campaign to stop or delay construction because of the threat a leak might pose to rivers and wetlands.

Crawford had asserted that the Keystone XL pipeline was not entitled to eminent domain because the pipeline would not be a common carrier, open to a variety of oil companies. She said that as a private project, it needed to negotiate rights of way without compelling landowners to enter agreements.

Usually the option of using eminent domain for pipelines is granted by state agencies; in Texas, it is recognized by the Texas Railroad Commission, a long-time regulator of the state oil industry.

Eminent domain is a touchy topic in Texas. In 2002, Gov. Rick Perry proposed a Trans-Texas Corridor, a private sector network of highways. The main artery would be a 600-mile road running from Mexico to the Red River that would be the width of four football fields. After an outcry about the seizure of private land — and increased traffic from Mexico — the state transportation department killed the idea.

“Of course we are incredibly disappointed in today’s ruling,” Crawford said in an e-mail late Wednesday night. “Disheartened that Texas landowners must still challenge oil corporations in court on what should be State-level permitting issues …. and disturbed that a foreign corporation like TransCanada is allowed to hide behind the skirt of the Texas Railroad Commission and its Common Carrier rubber stamp.”

Jane Kleeb, an activist with the group Bold Nebraska who has been fighting the pipeline’s eminent domain status, said in an e-mail Wednesday night that “A foreign oil company — exporting a form of energy that our government is still studying and the Canadian government just issued a safety violation on — gets to seize American land without proving they are a common carrier and without any requirement that Americans get a drop of the oil. There is something wrong with this picture.”

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A Texas rebellion over private property rights and a major new oil pipeline has been dealt a setback by a judge in Lamar County, who ruled that the Canadian pipeline company TransCanada has the right to exercise the power of eminent domain to run the Keystone XL pipeline across an opposing landowner’s property.

The ruling in Paris, Texas, from Lamar County Court-at-Law Judge Bill Harris — sent in a few terse words from his iPhone — was a blow to the unlikely coalition of environmentalists, ranchers and conservative tea party activists who have mounted a lively grass-roots challenge against the pipeline in a state traditionally friendly to oil and gas projects.

The judge’s brief ruling late Wednesday effectively recognizes what is known as common carrier status for the Keystone XL project and allows TransCanada to proceed with acquiring an easement across ranch manager Julia Trigg Crawford’s property.

Harris apparently rejected landowners’ arguments that under the definition of “common carrier,” TransCanada should have to prove in detail that the pipeline would be generally available to all oil shippers, not just a few private companies.

Opponents argue the Keystone XL pipeline, designed to eventually carry tar sands oil from Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast, is primarily designed to benefit the Canadian company and presents a potential environmental hazard for landowners along the route.

“This case has uncovered the craziness and the inequities that are in our current, rubber-stamp eminent domain process,” Crawford said in an interview Thursday. “What this means is that the lowest-level court has chosen to rule in TransCanada’s favor with a summary judgment, and I find it interesting that it was a 15-word ruling sent from his iPhone. We’ve been in court with thousands of pages of documents and testimony and witnesses and hearings, and it comes down to 15 words on an email form his phone.”

Crawford said she and her family had not yet decided whether to appeal the ruling.

TransCanada, which already has begun construction in Lamar County on the southern portion of the pipeline, has said it was following the provisions of Texas law, under which pipeline companies apply for common carrier status through the state.

“This ruling reaffirms that TransCanada has, and continues, to follow all state and federal laws and regulations as we move forward with the construction of the Gulf Coast project,” company spokesman Shawn Howard said in a statement.

Howard said the $2.3-billion southern pipeline project will provide a substantial benefit to Americans by way of construction jobs and by transporting lower-priced oil from West Texas and Oklahoma to Texas Gulf Coast refineries. “Refiners would rather process American and Canadian oil than higher priced crude from countries such as Venezuela and regions in the Middle East,” Howard said.

Though Texas is crisscrossed by pipelines from end to end, the Keystone XL project has been particularly controversial because of concerns that the thick diluted bitumen extracted from the Canadian tar sands is more corrosive than traditional crude oil and could pollute ranch lands and aquifers with dangerous heavy metals in the event of a spill.

Though the environmental argument doesn’t typically gain much currency in Texas, the fact that TransCanada has taken landowners to court in eminent domain proceedings to gain access to rights-of-way for the pipeline has sparked opposition from conservatives, including tea party activists.

“Judge Harris’ disappointing decision today further highlights the vulnerable and precarious position that Texas landowners are in,” Debra Medina, a former Republican candidate for governor favored by the tea party, said in a statement. “These cases are often argued in county courts poorly equipped to assess such weighty legal questions. These courts lack the resources to properly consider the complex and voluminous evidence assembled by multibillion-dollar corporations.”

Crawford has been offered $10,395 for the easement across the family ranch her grandfather bought in 1948 and said many of her neighbors already have accepted payments and permitted construction to begin.

“I’m sure the judge is in a very pressure-filled situation. And I bet he’s glad to have it out of his court. In one of his hearings, his opening statement was, ‘I never want to hear the word pipeline again,’” Crawford said.

“At this point, we can take what happened and walk away, knowing we did a god job, or appeal it to a higher court, a panel of three judges who deal with these kinds of cases all the time,” Crawford continued. “But either way we go on that, personally I’m going to continue championing the case for property rights.”

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Brigham A. McCown, the managing director of United Transportation Advisors LLC and a former acting administrator for the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), visited York this past week to discuss his point of view regarding the safety of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline.

He says he believes the pipeline, if created, “would be absolutely safe.”

“There is a response plan in place,” McCown says, in the event of a spill. “And TransCanada goes above and beyond what is required by the federal government” with the safety precautions they’ve proposed for the Keystone XL project.

“We’ve been pumping crude oil through the aquifer since the 1950s,” McCown said. “We have 40,000 miles of pipelines through aquifers and sensitive ecological areas. We have pipes going through pristine areas all over the nation. ”

York News-Times Publisher Greg Awtry commented to McCown that this pipeline, however, would not be carrying typical crude oil, but rather tar sands mixed with a number of chemicals, including benzene.

“If it were unsafe for this pipeline to go through the aquifer, I’d agree that it was a problem,” McCown said.

“But it is safe. Even with the worst case scenario, it won’t contaminate the aquifer. We’ve seen spills in rivers that transport the oil much easier than the aquifer would and those have been cleaned up.”

McCown also says he feels TransCanada would have a lot to lose should there ever be a spill – which would prompt them to make the pipeline as safe as possible.

“The cost to a company for an oil spill is huge,” McCown said.

“The damage to the company’s reputation, alone, will take long to repair. I don’t think any prudent operator would want to be an Enbridge.”

The Enbridge reference is to a massive pipeline break in Michigan. The Enbridge company failed to take immediate action when they realized they had an issue with the pipeline which ultimately led to 800,000 gallons of toxic oil spilling in a local creek and the Kalamazoo River.

It resulted in hundreds of people being physically ill and millions of dollars in property damage. PHMSA, the agency that was once led by McCown, has been said to have not had enough regulatory authority to have made more requirements that could have maybe avoided the situation.

“With Enbridge, we have a lot of bad pipe in the 1960s and 1970s,” McCown said.

“We know that now. Technology has allowed us to look back at fatigue cracks and most issues we find come back to that era of pipe.

If PHMSA had been on their stick at the time of this situation, it might not have been that way either. But you can’t say something will ever happen and I don’t think you can have an indictment of the entire industry due to one situation. If there’s one situation, do you then say no to all pipelines?

There is always room for improvement, but we can’t be totally risk free – if we were, we’d have never gone to the moon. There is inherent risk in everything.

“I’m not a representative for TransCanada, so I don’t know why they didn’t plan to put the Keystone XL pipeline right next to the first one. But I am here to say that you’ve already got pipelines running through the aquifer. People say ‘we need this, but not in my backyard.’ Isn’t this one of those situations?’”

McCown says his military background and past deployments to the Middle East further increase his “being a fan of reducing our oil needs from volatile regions of the world.”

What if the majority of the tar sands oil is still exported to other countries? “It’s a great thing if it is exported because it’s a made-in-the-USA product – it creates jobs. It would be great.

“I do understand the issues with the Sandhills (the pipeline running through that sensitive area of the state). As far as the aquifer, there’s no true safety reason it can’t pass through.

If so, we can’t have everyone move their pipelines out of the aquifer. I agree we need to mitigate risk, but we can’t eliminate it. I just don’t think there’s a safety issue here.

“What does concern me is that outside groups, anti-pipeline and anti-tar sands activists, were surprised by the Nebraska reaction and decided to exploit it,” McCown said further.

Regarding the argument that the chemical make-up of what would be flowing through the Keystone XL pipeline has not been disclosed, making it difficult for local emergency teams to respond in the event of a leak – McCown says standard emergency response guides have a section regarding who to call for assistance and protocol on how to handle different types of situations.

Going back to the Enbridge incident, McCown says “there’s a complete difference in how that pipeline was constructed and how the Keystone XL pipeline would be constructed.

The Keystone XL would have a better leak detection system, there have been technological advances and they have integrity (pipe durability) management. They will do routine scans” using private independent companies.

Should the government conduct pipeline inspections?

McCown says he’s not in favor of that scenario “because I don’t want to see the federal government do private companies favors with tax dollars. Besides, you can’t possibly have enough inspectors to be everywhere, on every inch of pipeline in this country. There has to be some trust with verification from companies.”

McCown says he feels Nebraska could take advantage of federal safety grants and he feels it would be important for the state to have its own inspectors “because I’m all for using state folks as much as possible.

He also noted that counties may apply for safety grants from the U.S. Department of Transportation and Homeland Security, regarding equipment they may need in the event of a pipeline leak.

“There are always things that can be done” to better assure safety, McCown said.

“TransCanada has complied with or exceeded regulatory mandates, especially in the areas of automation, valve spacing, etc. I don’t think you can look at Enbridge and compare the two because that was dealing with an old, different type of pipe.”

What if corporate priorities and policies change in the future, regarding TransCanada?

“The key is to make sure the pipeline is the best possible for today and continue to make improvements tomorrow,” McCown said.

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Most rural Nebraskans favor building the Keystone XL pipeline but think it should be built on a route that avoids the Sandhills and the Ogallala Aquifer.

That’s the tone of 2,323 mailed responses to the most recent Nebraska Rural Poll.

The latest findings from the poll, now in its 17th year, were unveiled Tuesday by the Center for Applied Rural Innovation at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in cooperation with the Nebraska Rural Initiative.

Some 65 percent of those who returned the polling form said the pipeline should be built outside the Sandhills and away from the Ogallala Aquifer. But 61 percent rejected the premise that it should not be built at all “because the environmental risks outweigh the economic benefits.”

Randy Cantrell, a rural sociologist at UNL, said the pipeline is one of the hotter topics he and his peers have addressed in poll history, but not the only one.

“We asked about food animal welfare last year, which is a pretty hot topic,” Cantrell said. “This year, honestly, we expected this to be over,” he said of the pipeline controversy. “But it turns out that it wasn’t.

“And it turned out that we were doing a series on opinions on land use and environment. And, boy, this sure seemed to fit with opinions on land use and environment, so we took a chance with it.”

Poll results emerge with the Keystone XL still under review by the U.S. State Department and the Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality.

The latest round of scrutiny for a pipeline that would connect Canadian oilsands with refineries along the U.S. Gulf Coast followed the decision of pipeline builder TransCanada to shift the Nebraska portion of the route farther east.

John Hibbing, a political science professor at UNL, called a poll response rate above one in three (2,323 out of 6,350 randomly selected households) “quite remarkable.”

The sample base includes 84 non-metro counties and excludes Lancaster, Douglas and other counties surrounding Lincoln, Omaha and Sioux City, Iowa.

Hibbing acknowledged that a mail survey tends to draw most heavily from people who feel most strongly about a subject, because “you’ve got to be kind of committed to get your thoughts out there.”

But surveys done by phone and door-to-door have their own problems, and the Rural Poll response rate is “far better than you see on most telephone surveys.”

Sought out later Tuesday, both a TransCanada spokesman and a prominent Nebraska pipeline critic said they saw validation in the poll for their positions.

“We’re pleased to see the strong support reflected in the poll for building the pipeline,” said Shawn Howard of TransCanada. “That’s consistent with our discussion of the pipeline with Nebraskans.”

He said poll findings corresponded with the feedback the company and state officials got earlier this year in a series of public meetings along the proposed alternative route.

“People who came out were strongly in support of the pipeline,” he said. “They understood the importance of it and the fact that pipelines are critical to our way of life because of the products they carry.”

But Jane Kleeb of Hastings and Bold Nebraska said the poll outcome “shows that TransCanada’s multi-million dollar ad campaign is not penetrating like they’d hoped.”

The poll also underscores the need for more education about the environmental impact of extracting oil from sand deposits in Canada, Kleeb said. “The more citizens and landowners know about tarsands, the more opposed they are to it completely.”

Brad Lubben, part of the core group at UNL that interprets the poll, said it carries a message from Nebraskans that the pipeline should be built, but also that it should be built responsibly.

Lubben said there’s room to disagree about the extent to which the alternative route for the pipeline moves away from some of the state’s most sensitive natural resources.

In relation to the Sandhills map, for example, “it’s just east of the Sandhills, but it’s still pretty sandy.”

On the other hand, even if Keystone XL was put next to the first Keystone pipeline TransCanada put in operation in eastern Nebraska in 2010, “it still goes over reaches of the aquifer.”

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Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), citing national security concerns, is questioning a Chinese oil company’s planned purchase of the Canadian energy firm Nexen Inc., which holds substantial Gulf of Mexico oil-and-gas assets.

Inhofe joins a pair of senior Democrats – Sen. Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) and Rep. Ed Markey (Mass.) – in questioning state-owned CNOOC Ltd.’s proposed $15.1 billion purchase of Nexen.

“I have serious national security concerns with the Chinese government, acting through one of its corporations, purchasing a company that will give it control over significant U.S. oil and gas resources,” Inhofe told MarketWatch in a statement.

“This combined with China’s closed economy, its prohibition on direct, full investment in Chinese business operations by U.S. firms, and its blatant disregard to U.S. intellectual property rights make this transaction even more concerning,” adds Inhofe, who is a senior member of the Armed Services Committee.

The Oklahoma Republican’s comments follow a late July letter about the CNOOC-Nexen deal from Schumer to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, whose department heads the interagency panel that reviews foreign purchases of U.S. assets that could affect national security.

Schumer similarly criticized China for failing to provide U.S. businesses access to its markets, and said Treasury should “withhold approval of this transaction until China’s government has made tangible, enforceable commitments to ensure U.S. companies reciprocal treatment.

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Markey, in a separate letter to Geithner, called for action to ensure payment of Gulf of Mexico royalties from leases that currently allow royalty-free oil-and-gas production.

Another Republican, Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.), said in late July that he has “concerns” about the CNOOC-Nexen deal.

Hoeven and other advocates of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline have cited the planned purchase of Nexen – which is a significant player in the Canadian oil sands – in calling for Obama administration approval of the pipeline.

TransCanada Corp.’s proposed pipeline would bring Canadian oil sands to Gulf Coast refineries.

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