Lisa Lerer and Jim Snyder
report:
TransCanada Corp. (TRP) chief executive Russ Girling acknowledged that opponents of the Keystone XL pipeline have slowed its approval, though he said his company remains committed to the project.
“There’s no question that the noise outside is having an influence on the process,” he said today, in an interview in Washington. “The project has been hijacked by activists that are opposed to the development of all fossil fuels.” [...]
“Nobody is going to pack up their tent and leave,” he said. “We will get through these hurdles. The marketplace will determine whether these projects get done.”
Girling met with State Department officials Tuesday and expressed his frustration with an approval process that has lasted five years. The State Department is reviewing the project because the pipeline would cross the U.S.-Canadian border and thus requires a presidential permit. President Obama must base his decision to grant or reject a permit on whether the pipeline is in the "national interest."
If the president does approve the pipeline, those widespread protests Girling took note of could be small potatoes. Thousands of people have already been arrested in anti-Keystone XL protests. More than 76,000 activists have pledged to engage "in acts of dignified, peaceful civil disobedience that could result in my arrest" to stop the pipeline from being built. Some critics who aren't in the fossil fuel companies' pocket, like Jonathan Chait, argue that the Keystone opposition has been a waste of activists' time because the impact on the atmosphere from burning that oil is relatively small. But that perspective ignores the fact this battle is just one of several meant to keep as much fossil fuel in the ground as possible.
Keystone would carry as much as 830,000 barrels of petroleum—diluted bitumen—from the Alberta tar-sand deposits to Texas gulf coast refineries. Many environmental advocates view exploitation of the vast tar sands as disastrous for the planet because those deposits cause more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional sources of oil. Approval of the pipeline would not only speed up that exploitation but also provide impetus for extraction of even dirtier petroleum, such as the oil shale deposits in the Green River formation of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming.
The State Department is said to be looking into how much oil might be moved by rail instead. Railroads have vastly expanded how much oil they now move. In the first half of 2009, oil shipments by rail totaled 5,358 carloads. In the first half of 2013, they soared to 355,933 carloads. Moving oil by rail generally costs significantly more than moving it by pipeline, but adding terminals and other infrastructure for rail is far quicker and cheaper than building a pipeline.
Most of the rise in moving oil by rail has occurred to move oil from the booming production in the Bakken formation in North Dakota and Montana. The State Department might conclude that saying "no" to the pipeline wouldn't greatly affect Canada's ability to transport tar-sands petroleum. That is so, even though industry experts say rail will not replace pipelines:
"We remain very, very confident that rail is here to stay as not a replacement for pipelines, but as a supplement to pipelines," Stew Hanlon, president of Gibson Energy Inc., a logistics company, told investors in August about a Canadian loading project.
A report and recommendation from the State Department could be presented within the next few weeks.