Rancor Grows Over Planned Oil Pipeline From Canada

By KIRK JOHNSON and DAN FROSCH

GLENDIVE, Mont. — The final days of rancorous public debate over a $7 billion oil pipeline that would snake from Canada through the midsection of the United States have taken on an unexpected urgency this week, as the economic and environmental stakes of the massive project snap into focus at a time of festering anxiety about the nation’s future.

The round of public hearings by the State Department being held along the pipeline’s proposed route — from a community college gymnasium here on Tuesday in rural eastern Montana, through Nebraska and Oklahoma to the Texas Gulf Coast — is ostensibly meant to focus on a single question: Is the pipe in the national interest?

Addressing that question though — especially through the sprawling sweep of six huge states through which the pipeline or its pumping stations would run like a spine — takes in a universe of conflicting, interlocking issues, from short-term economics to long-term climate, from the discontent of a rural belt losing population to issues of national energy security, joblessness, the environment and prices at the corner pump.

Hundreds of people have come to the meetings — one on Thursday night in remote Atkinson, Neb., is expected to double the town’s population of about 1,200. From pocketbook economics to global warming, advocates for and against the project say they are making their last stand.

The State Department concluded last month that the project, Keystone XL, would cause minimal environmental impact if it is operated according to regulations, and the proposed operator, TransCanada, has said the nearly 2,000-mile line would create 20,000 jobs in the United States. Opposition groups around the country, though, said the federal study did not consider the effects of a major spill, while supporters said the nation’s economy had continued to worsen through summer and fall, making Keystone XL all the more crucial.

“We need the jobs, it’s that simple,” said Bret Marshall, 53, a laborer’s union worker who said he hoped to get work on the line and drove more than 700 miles across Montana to be here for Tuesday night’s hearing.

The politics has fractured along unexpected lines as well. Here in Montana, Gov. Brian Schweitzer, a Democrat, strongly supports the project, while in Nebraska, Gov. Dave Heineman, a Republican, and both United States senators — Ben Nelson, a Democrat, and Mike Johanns, a Republican — have called for Keystone XL to be rerouted because of concerns about the Ogallala Aquifer, an expansive pool of fresh groundwater that lies beneath the Great Plains.

In Texas, a Tea Party-backed former candidate for governor, Debra Medina, was set to appear alongside the liberal commentator Jim Hightower at a rally in Austin on Wednesday night — allies, for the moment, in expressing concerns about the line.

“This is a foreign company using the club of eminent domain to take land from Texas landowners,” Ms. Medina said in an interview, stressing that property rights, not oil, was the issue for her. “You don’t steal your neighbor’s land in a free market.”

The public meetings also come on the heels of a summer’s worth of anti-Keystone XL protests in front of the White House, which drew celebrities like Daryl Hannah and led to the arrests of more than 1,000 people. The State Department is expected to decide by the end of the year whether to give its final approval, which would allow the project to proceed.

Groups like the National Wildlife Federation, while conceding that the Obama administration seemed to be leaning toward approval, gathered local organizations to speak out this week, hoping that the prospect of landowners, conservationists and ranchers laying out impassioned concerns would give Washington pause.

“The whole policy debate has dramatically increased in stature from a year ago,” said Anthony Swift, a policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council, which is against the pipeline. “The political stakes have also really increased. People would not be protesting, let alone getting arrested, for something that is a foregone conclusion.”

In Nebraska, controversy over Keystone XL has even managed to envelop the state’s beloved college football team.

Earlier this month, the University of Nebraska’s athletic director, Tom Osborne, who is a former Republican congressman, pulled TransCanada’s sponsorship of a highlight video that ran on big screens during two home games. The video paid homage to a former Cornhusker offensive line known as “the Pipeline,” and featured TransCanada’s logo.

Mr. Osborne said the athletic department took no position on Keystone XL, but sought to avoid running advertisements of a political nature. “Over the last two or three months, the pipeline issue has been increasingly politicized,” he said in a statement.

One of the main contentions expressed by Keystone XL’s opponents this week, and one that will continue to be leveled in the coming months, is that a pipeline of this size and scope is simply too risky to operate.

Keystone XL will carry a coarse mixture that includes bitumen drawn from the oil sands of Alberta. Environmental groups have long contended that oil sands crude is more corrosive to pipelines and more difficult to clean when spilled.

A TransCanada spokesman, Terry Cunha, pointed out that the company had agreed to adhere to 57 special conditions outlined in the State Department study designed to keep the pipeline especially secure.

According to TransCanada, Keystone XL will be fashioned with thicker pipe in especially sensitive regions — called “high-consequence areas” in federal pipeline regulations — and monitored with thousands of sensors. It will ultimately be the safest pipeline in the country, Mr. Cunha said.

“We believe it is important that the decision on this presidential permit is based on facts and not on the mistruths that many of these groups continue to share,” Mr. Cunha said. “As we’ve highlighted numerous times, we are building a pipeline system that will deliver the same type of crude oil the U.S. imports from Russia, Venezuela and Nigeria and that the U.S. has been transporting across the country for years.”

But some pipeline safety experts and environmentalists have raised concerns that the tiny federal agency that oversees the nation’s expansive network of pipelines, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, is ill equipped to oversee a project of Keystone’s magnitude.

A raft of recent oil spills, chronic inspector shortages and regulations that rely heavily on self-reporting illustrate deep problems with the federal pipeline agency, they say.

And people in rural areas like eastern Montana say they also know that in the dry and mostly empty ranchlands where they live, they are not, and never have been, places of high consequence.

“Nobody wants to be told they’re of low consequence,” said Tim Hess, 65, a wheat farmer and cattle rancher born and raised here in Montana who would have about 1.5 miles of pipe cross his land.

Where the pipe would go exactly, and how much landowners might be compensated — or, some say, put at risk — is also unclear. Mr. Hess said, for example, that an early map of the pipe had it snaking diagonally across a sandy, erosion-prone part of his ranch that was planted in the 1960s and ’70s with rows of trees aimed at holding the soil. He complained to Montana environmental protection officials who agreed with him, he said, that simply by straightening the angle of the pipe a bit and going down between rows of trees, much of the windbreak might be saved. But a subsequent pipeline map, Mr. Hess said, showed the same cross-cut angle.

Financial negotiations with a group of landowners, including Mr. Hess, who account for about 80 miles of pipeline in Montana, were scheduled to begin on Wednesday, leading at least a few attending the hearing to say that they would not be quoted for fear of disrupting their payday.

Keystone XL’s opponents also point to a massive Enbridge Energy spill of 843,000 gallons of oil sands crude near Marshall, Mich., as an example of what happens when something goes wrong.

A little over a year after the spill, a 35-mile stretch of the Kalamazoo River remains closed. This summer, the Environmental Protection Agency’s administrator in the Great Lakes region, Susan Hedman, said in an e-mail that her office had not previously seen a river system affected by so much submerged oil.

And just this week, Enbridge stated in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission that the costs associated with the spill, originally estimated at $585 million, might now increase by 20 percent.

Pipeline supporters at the public hearings, though, have hammered over and over on two main points — that the nation desperately needs jobs, and that the oil would be coming from a nation friendly to the United States. The Keystone pipeline would also allow oil from newly developing fields in the Dakotas, Montana and elsewhere to be shipped south to Texas refineries, sharply boosting the local economic appeal.

“All I ask is that you treat the 50,000 people in these six counties with respect and dignity,” Glendive’s mayor, Jerry Jimison, said Tuesday in comments that supported the pipeline but also seemed veiled with a threat that local residents should not be taken for granted. “That will affect the long-term relationship into the future.”