Sat., June 9, 2012
WHITEWATER, MONTANA—Three years ago, when the Canadian pipeline people first came round Bob Math’s cattle ranch in northernmost Montana, the conversation was brittle.
The TransCanada emissaries were pleasant enough. But it soon became apparent their Keystone XL pipeline was more than a proposal. They were talking fait accompli.
“It wasn’t a request, it was an announcement: ‘This is what we’re going to do on your land,’” Math says of that initial overture to trench through his 600-head Black Angus operation tucked up tight on the Saskatchewan border.
Fast-forward to 2012 and Math is onside, having palmed a TransCanada cheque to seal the deal. And so the Canadians have this most important of neighbours — the first one on the American side — on board. And thousands more besides.
Two factors swayed Math to surrender permission on land homesteaded by his great-grandfather in 1915: The promise of KXL taxes for his local county government, which badly needs the help; and the fact that there is already a natural gas pipeline running beneath his property, one that hasn’t given him a speck of trouble since it was laid in the 1980s.
After Math, 52, signed his rights away, he was awakened one morning last year by a deafening scream.
The gas pipeline on his property had blown a valve, sending a pressurized white plume high into the air. He sounded the alert and plugged his ears, taking cold comfort as the gas erupted skyward, up, up and away from his livestock and the water table they depend on.
You don’t have to tell Bob Math that when oil bursts from a pipeline it doesn’t go up.
“I’m not too worried about it,” says Math, with some degree of uncertainty and the knowledge it’s too late to change his mind. “Maybe I should be . . . ”
The journey
Welcome to the first stop on the Star’s 4,000-kilometre journey into the heart of Keystone XL. Brace for a bumpy ride as we zigzag the length of the scheme to pipe Alberta’s oilsands through America like never before.
At its essence, Keystone XL is just a pipe — a 91-centimetre diameter hard steel fact, like so many others already embedded in the American landscape. Priced at a cool $7 billion (some of that already spent on legal fees, design, logistics and payouts to people like Bob Math), it would stretch more than 2,700 kilometres from Hardisty, Alta., to the refineries of Port Arthur, Texas, where the world will be its oyster — a tax-free exit point to global markets.
Running under high pressure, a maximum flow of 750,000 barrels a day of granular diluted bitumen would also be hot, as steamy as 66 Celsius by some estimates, through sheer friction. Unquestionably, it would bring employment to job-starved America — something in the range of 3,500 to 4,200 temporary construction positions for two years before staffing levels fall to a minimal maintenance workforce, according to U.S. State Department estimates. Other estimates, like the industry-lobbying American Petroleum Institute’s fabled “one million new jobs,” belong in the fiction section.
But in the fever swamp of election-year America, the myth-addled Canadian project has morphed into an oil-fired political battering ram — one so powerful it could well take down President Barack Obama.
In delaying his KXL decision beyond November’s election, Team Obama was hoping to put the Alberta oilsands on a shelf. But the Republicans won’t let him.
Nor indeed will Mitt Romney, who two weeks ago set it right back on the table in a campaign video titled Day One . Approval of the KXL pipeline will be the first order of a Romney administration.
Ironic, no? This is the same Obama who bailed out Detroit even as Romney prescribed bankruptcy for his hometown. And now, with a gassy flourish, Romney is bailing in on the pipeline that Obama just cannot bring himself to love.
At least not while keeping his environmental constituency fired up for the polls of November.
Some might say it’s a perfect match, contemporary U.S. politics and Alberta oilsands. Both are toxic, both laced with harmful byproducts, both require immense energy to sort good from bad.
Yet here along the Great Plains, the geo-politics match up almost perfectly on both sides of the border. From Tory-blue Alberta, the pipeline path passes through an unbroken string of safely Republican states all the way to Texas.
Don’t hold your breath looking for a conversation on the climate. These are pro-energy people in the main, ready to embrace the promise of jobs, lower gas prices, and energy security no matter how inflated.
There are pockets of holdouts up and down the line. Most vividly in the fragile and water-rich Sandhills of Nebraska, where landowners vow this pipeline will run over their dead bodies.
But even Nebraska, once you get beyond the delicate Sandhills ecosystem, tells another story. Like the corn farmers around Steele City, near the border with Kansas, who have nothing but praise and welcome for KXL.
Or the landowner who met us at his 65-hectare patch of Merrick County with a .357 Magnum on the seat of his truck. His first gesture was to hand over a stack of printouts from WorldNetDaily, the leading outlet for Obama birther conspiracies. “Here’s some truth for you,” he said. He too had nothing but good to say about Keystone XL. And nothing but scary to say about Obama.
Deeper still down the Keystone XL trail, Kansas is so completely behind the pipeline that the state signed off on an astonishing 10-year property tax holiday for TransCanada, a concession worth millions. Every other state on the route will get a cut — ostensibly an easy negotiation considering how pipeline builders tend to prefer straight lines.
As for Oklahoma, well, once you get to Cushing that’s the end of the energy-crazed line. Though Keystone XL’s final destination is the Gulf Coast, the last leg is a done deal, given that it does not cross a U.S. border and therefore skirts the presidential permit process.
It’s the northern route that isn’t quite sealed yet.
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