Deal means Keystone heavy-oil pipeline would be routed away from Sand Hills of Nebraska

Days after the Obama administration said it would delay a decision on the Keystone XL oil pipeline, an agreement was announced to reroute the line to avoid the Sand Hills region of Nebraska, right. The announcement was made Monday, during a special state legislative session called to consider the issue. TransCanada, the oil company, said it would support state legislation to shift the route.

If approved, the pipeline would carry to the Gulf of Mexico heavy oil produced from Alberta tar sands. The Sand Hills region is environmentally sensitive and overlies the Ogallala Aquifer, the drinking-water source for much of the Great Plains. Daniel Frosch of The New York Times reports the rerouting offer does little to change the State Department's plans to conduct a new environmental review of the changed route. A new review is expected to take over a year and push the final decision into 2013, after the next presidential election.

Though the deal is being hailed as a "win-win," Paul Hammel and Martha Stoddard of the Omaha World-Herald report opponents of the pipeline project question why Nebraska taxpayers will pay for the review by the Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality. Spokeswoman for lobbying group BOLD Nebraska said taxpayers should not have to pay for TransCanada's mistake of trying to cross the Sand Hills. Sen. Mike Flood, a key proponent of the compromise, said "the cost was worth it to protect the state's natural resources and to ensure that a state review would be impartial."