President Obama touted the construction of an oil pipeline from Oklahoma to the Gulf of Mexico today as a sign of oil production under his leadership, even though his State Department originally killed that pipeline when it refused to permit the construction of the Keystone pipeline.

 

"We just announced that we’ll do whatever we can to speed up construction of a pipeline in Oklahoma that’s going to relieve a bottleneck and get more oil to the Gulf -- to the refineries down there -- and that’s going to help create jobs, encourage more production," Obama said in North Carolina today. "So these are the facts on oil production.  If somebody tells you we’re not producing enough oil, they just don’t know the facts."

The pipeline to which Obama alluded is only being constructed because TransCanada redefined the project to avoid the State Department's  regulatory control over the Keystone XL pipeline. "[TransCanada] informed the DOS that what had been the Cushing to U.S. Gulf Coast portion of the Keystone XL Project has its own independent value to the marketplace and will be constructed as a stand-alone Gulf Coast Project, not part of the Presidential Permit process," the company announced two weeks ago.