Soon after Prime Minister Stephen Harper and President Barack Obama, Obama made public his decision to deny the application by TransCanada Corp. to build the pipeline. The federal government has said it will renew efforts to ship Canadian oil to Asian markets and Harper told Obama in a phone call Wednesday he was “profoundly disappointed” with the U.S. decision on the Keystone XL project and said that Canada would seek other markets for its energy exports. Obama denied the application, citing a “rushed and arbitrary deadline” imposed by Congress to review the pipeline project. “This announcement is not a judgment on the merits of the pipeline, but the arbitrary nature of a deadline that prevented the State Department from gathering the information necessary to approve the project and protect the American people,” Obama explained in a statement. In its own statement, TransCanada Corp. said it remained “fully committed” to the project and said it would reapply in hopes of getting approval that would allow the pipeline to be up and running by 2014. The U.S. decision appears to have strengthened Canada’s resolve to look for other buyers for its energy, particularly Japan and China, where Harper is scheduled to visit next month. “We basically have currently one customer for our energy exports,” Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver said Wednesday, noting that 99% of Canada’s oil exports go to the U.S. “That customer has said it doesn’t want to expand at the moment so it certainly intensifies the broad strategic objective of the government to diversify our markets to Asia,” he said. “We want to diversify our market, China wants to diversity its sources of supply. They are hungry for our energy. They are growing at an extremely rapid rate. They are the biggest consumers of energy in the entire world,” he said.