WASHINGTON - Amazon has cemented a partnership with the company that owns the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, recently announcing that TC Energy is “going all-in” on Amazon Web Services. The Canadian pipeline corporation, formerly known as TransCanada, has “migrated almost 90 percent of its corporate and commercial applications” to Amazon Web Services.
AWS released a statement saying, “TC Energy is going all-in on the world’s leading cloud, moving its entire infrastructure to AWS.” The announcement comes just weeks after TC Energy’s long-contested Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry some of the dirtiest, most carbon-intensive oil on the planet from the Alberta tar sands basin to Nebraska, faced a major legal setback when its permit was vacated by a federal judge.
Mitchell Browning, TC Energy’s senior developer for U.S. Real Time Systems, said months earlier at a presentation given at a tech conference held in San Francisco that AWS technology can help TC Energy maximize the profitability of its pipeline networks by combining third-party data sources, weather data, commercial data, and pipeline metered flow data into the AWS machine learning platform.
Additionally, on Monday the Trump administration finalized a rule Monday that takes aim at a powerful tool used by states to block new pipelines and coal export terminals. The final rule limits the types of issues that states can consider when using their authority under Section 401 of the CWA to block a federal permit and sets tight deadlines for them to do so. The rule also allows EPA to overrule a state's permit denial if the agency decides the action was based on issues outside the scope of the state's authority. Environmentalists have planned legal challenges to the rule, which they say conflicts directly with the Supreme Court precedent supporting states' authority under the 1972 water law. The rule will also have major implications for the relicensing of hydropower dams across the country. However, Senator John Barrasso said, “planning legal challenges to the rule, which they say conflicts directly with Supreme Court precedent supporting states' authority under the 1972 water law. The rule will also have major implications for the relicensing of hydropower dams across the country.”