Washington (Platts)--13Feb2012/309 pm EST/2009 GMT

Backers of the Keystone XL oil pipeline in the US Senate prepared to attach legislation Monday giving Congress authority to approve TransCanada's controversial project to a must-pass transportation package.

An adviser to Senator Richard Lugar, Republican-Indiana, said the group of mostly Republican pipeline supporters would introduce an amendment Monday to the highway bill, which the Senate is expected to consider this week. The amendment has no guarantee of a vote in the Democratic-controlled chamber.

"We're not looking for a partisan victory here," Neil Brown, Lugar's adviser said in an email. "We're looking for the project to begin."

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Environmental groups opposed to the project, meanwhile, recruited members to flood Capitol Hill offices with phone calls and emails objecting to any efforts to circumvent the permitting process.

"We have a matter of hours to put together a massive response to show them that approving Keystone is unacceptable," organizers of 350.org told its members.

Fifteen leading climate scientists, including James Hansen, who heads NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, urged Congress to consider long-term environmental damage posed by mining Alberta's oil sands.

"It takes a lot of energy and water to extract and refine this resource into useable fuel, and the mining is environmentally destructive," they wrote in a letter Monday to Senate and House leaders. "Adding this on top of conventional fossil fuels will leave our children and grandchildren a climate system with consequences that are out of their control. It makes no sense to build a pipeline that would dramatically increase exploitation of this resource."

INITIAL REJECTION LINKED TO CONGRESSIONAL DEADLINE

President Barack Obama rejected TransCanada's original application to build the 1,700-mile pipeline January 18, saying the decision rested not on the project's merits, but rather on what he said was an unreasonable 60-day deadline Congress imposed on the process.

TransCanada promised to reapply and pushed back its in-service target to late 2014.

The highway bill amendment will mirror language introduced in late January by Senator John Hoeven, Republican-North Dakota. The bill (S. 2041) drew the support of 43 other Republicans and a single Democrat, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia.

It would remove a requirement for the executive branch to issue a permit allowing the pipeline to cross the US-Canada border in Phillips County, Montana, and deem a final environmental impact statement issued by the State Department in October as sufficient for satisfying the National Environmental Policy Act.

It would also allow Nebraska's ongoing work rerouting the pipeline around a critical aquifer to continue on a separate track from Congress' consideration of the overall project. If the legislation passes, any lawsuits challenging the Keystone XL permitting process would have to be heard by the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Keystone XL supporters in the House of Representatives last week introduced a bill (H.R. 4000) identical to the Senate language.

--Meghan Gordon, meghan_gordon@platts.com

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