Obama turns down Keystone XL oil pipeline The Obama administration has turned down the contentious Keystone XL oil sands pipeline project, but has left the door open for a revised application to be submitted. The move cheered environmentalists but Republicans leapt on the news to push home their argument that the government's policies were destroying jobs. "President Obama is about to destroy tens of thousands of American jobs and sell American energy security to the Chinese," said a spokesman for John Boehner, Republican speaker of the House of Representatives. The president won't stand up to his political base even to create American jobs. This is not the end of this fight. Mitt Romney, the frontrunner for the party's presidential nomination, called the decision "shocking" on the campaign trail in South Carolina. Barack Obama has had to weigh environmental concerns against the project's potential to create badly needed jobs. Transcanada, the company that would run Keystone XL, says it would create 13,000 jobs in construction and a further 7,000 in supplies of equipment and materials, such as steel. Some of the largest US trade unions - a core part of Mr Obama's base - have favoured the project, and some Democratic members of Congress have also said they want to see it approved. The 1,700-mile route to bring heavy oil from the tar sands of Alberta in western Canada to refineries on the coast of Texas has been bitterly opposed by environmental groups. Oil from the sands creates more greenhouse gas emissions from its extraction than many other forms of crude, and campaigners such as 350.org hope to stifle the industry's growth by cutting off their export routes to get the oil to market. In addition, there have been concerns about the pipeline's impact on the environmentally sensitive Sandhills region of Nebraska. The Obama administration's decision would leave the door open to a revision of the route in order to mitigate those worries in a new application. Transcanada has already been working on possible alternative routes though Nebraska to avoid the Sandhills region. It has also continued to sign up new customers for the pipeline. The State Department originally said it would not be able to make a decision until the first quarter of 2013 at the earliest; after this year's presidential election. However, last month Republicans in Congress sought to put pressure on the administration to approve the project more quickly, linking the issue to the dispute over the extension of payroll tax cuts that were due to expire at the end of last year. In the deal between Congress and the president to resolve that dispute, the administration was set a deadline of 60 days to make a decision on Keystone XL. However, the White House has warned several times that it would be unable to give the green light to the pipeline that quickly. Given a decision from the administration early in 2013, the company said, Keystone XL could still be in service by the end of 2014. However, Bill McKibben of 350.org, who has led the protests against the pipeline, said the campaign to kill it would continue. "The knock on Barack Obama from many quarters has been that he's too conciliatory," he said. "But here, in the face of a naked political threat from big oil to exact "huge political consequences," he's stood up strong." Mr Obama's independent advisory council on jobs and competitiveness had recommended on Tuesday that he should give Keystone XL the go-ahead. David Pumphrey of the Center for Strategic and International Studies said rapidly rising oil production in the Bakken shale of North Dakota added to the pressure to build new pipelines. "I think Keystone XL or something like it will get built," he said in an email. The economic advantages of moving directly to the Gulf coast and the increasing need to build infrastructure out of the Bakken is going to make some type of pipeline necessary.