President-elect Trump aims to restart progress on the Keystone XL pipeline on his first day back in the White House, even though there has been no major push to resume construction and the pipeline's developer effectively has given up the project, Politico reported this week.

Trump reportedly believes declaring the 1,200-mile Canada-to-Nebraska pipeline project back on the table would drive the pro-oil message he delivered in his campaign, and he wants to show he can defy President Biden, who reversed Trump's initial 2017 approval of the project.

Trump may have difficulty in seeing a smooth start to reviving the project given that developer TC Energy (TRP) no longer owns the pipeline system, and any portions of the pipeline that had been installed underground in both the U.S. and Canada have since been dug up.

Perhaps most important, current oil market conditions do not support undertaking what would be a multibillion-dollar pipeline, Andy Lipow, head of oil market consulting firm Lipow Oil Associates, told Politico.

The Trans Mountain pipeline, which completed a major expansion in May and now transports 890K bbl/day of Canadian crude and other fuels to the western coast for export, reducing the need for a pipeline going south into the U.S., overall global oil demand growth is expected to remain slow for the foreseeable future, and OPEC has 5M bbl/day of spare capacity it could bring online.

"A lot of the impetus for Keystone XL that we had seen in years past is not there today," Lipow said.