Washington DC - US President Donald Trump on Monday called for the revival of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry oil from Canada to the US. Confusingly, on Tuesday he then repeated past claims that America doesn't need any natural resources from Canada.

"We don't need their oil. We don't need their lumber," Trump told White House reporters on Tuesday, making another irreverent comment about Canada becoming "the 51st US state" amid his allegedly forward-moving tariff threats.

Trump took to his online platform Truth Social on Monday to urge the company building the pipeline to come back to America.

"The Trump Administration is very different – easy approvals, almost immediate start," he said.

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"If not them, perhaps another pipeline company. We want the Keystone XL pipeline built," he added.

The pipeline, first proposed in 2008, has been controversial from the start.

The company, TC Energy, had argued that bringing so much oil from friendly, neighboring Canada would reduce US dependence on oil from more adversarial countries.

The 1,210-mile pipeline, part of which was completed, was to transport up to 830,000 barrels of oil per day from the Alberta oil sands to Nebraska, which would then travel through an existing system to refineries in coastal Texas.

While the project had long been backed by Canada, Keystone XL had been opposed by environmentalists and Indigenous groups, who organized rallies against it in Washington, Ottawa, and in other affected areas.

US President Barack Obama rejected the project in 2015 due to environmental concerns before Trump revived it during his first term in office.

Then, in one of his first actions as US president in 2021, Joe Biden revoked Trump's permit for the pipeline, stating that its construction was not consistent with his administration's economic and climate goals.