Environmentalists and farmers are crying foul today as the Nebraska Legislature prepares to pass a bill aimed at fast-tracking the review of a proposed new route for a controversial, now-stalled Canada-to-U.S. oil pipeline.

The new Nebraska measure would empower the state's Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) to gauge the impact of proposed pipelines, a shift from legislation passed in a much-watched special session last year that handed that job to the more politically independent Public Service Commission (PSC) (Greenwire, Nov. 22, 2011).

While this year's bill also puts a fresh burden on Keystone XL sponsor TransCanada Corp., telling it to reimburse the state for an expected $2 million review, advocacy groups seeking to force the pipeline away from Nebraska's Ogallala Aquifer blasted the legislation as a "rubber stamp" of the 1,700-mile project.

Ken Winston of the Cornhusker State Sierra Club yesterday called the DEQ's framework for weighing pipelines' merits "much easier" than the PSC's.

"The burden of showing that a proposed route is in the public interest is on the pipeline applicant" at the PSC, he explained. "Maybe TransCanada doesn't think they can meet that standard, but that's no reason to get rid of the law."

At the heart of the Nebraska debate is the uncertainty over what route the $7 billion XL line would take across the 225,000-square-mile aquifer, which crosses eight states and provides most of Cornhuskers' drinking water.

Bold Nebraska Executive Director Jane Kleeb, one of the state's most active anti-XL organizers, said Gov. Dave Heineman (R) had "flip-flopped" on opposition to routing the pipeline over the Ogallala, as stated in an Aug. 31 letter to the Obama administration.

The push to sign off on the still-unreleased new route for Keystone XL amounts to a GOP search for "a talking point for the election cycle," Kleeb told reporters yesterday. Republicans "want to say Nebraska has approved this pipeline" while President Obama remains the lone obstacle to its construction, she added.

Heineman spokeswoman Jen Rae Hein responded in an interview that the governor objected to the original route of the XL line because it "would have bisected the Ogallala Aquifer" in a more direct manner than its predecessor, the Keystone I pipeline -- which itself crosses the right edge of the water source. Heineman's resistance to the original route, Hein added, amounted to resisting "a route through the Sandhills," the ecologically sensitive region that houses thousands of migrating cranes each year.

The XL link would nearly double U.S. import capacity for Canadian oil-sands crude, bitterly opposed by environmentalists who view its emissions-intensive extraction as a climate change as well as human health threat. Industry groups in sectors beyond oil and gas are leading an intense lobbying push for the project, billing it as a job creator that could displace fuel imports from the Middle East.

TransCanada, while it works on crafting a new route for the pipeline across the U.S.-Canada border, is pressing ahead with a 454-mile section of the project between Oklahoma and Texas that Obama supports. The broader battle over increased oil-sands crude development remains as politically charged as ever in the meantime, with House Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) today traveling to a Detroit refinery being expanded to process the heavier, thicker fuel.

TransCanada spokesman Shawn Howard welcomed the Nebraska Legislature’s "strong support" in a statement that promised to coordinate with DEQ "very soon" on a new route for the pipeline and hailed the Heineman-steered agency as "representing the real interests of Nebraskans."

"The fact remains that an overwhelming majority of Nebraskans support the Keystone XL pipeline," Howard added. "Even many of those who expressed opposition to the pipeline in 2011 had issue with the route only, not the pipeline, the oil, or the economic and energy security benefits it will bring to Nebraska and America."

On the anti-oil-sands side of the public relations standoff, environmental groups hailed a move yesterday by household-products company Seventh Generation to begin steering away from refineries that use the Canadian crude.