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.
Nashua, Montana
You don’t plan 2,700 kilometres of pipeline without obstacles. And 90 minutes deeper into Montana, there’s a huge one called the Missouri River.
Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark up these waters 208 years ago. And right here on the north bank, a few clicks southeast of Nashua, the Garwood clan settled a century later, as the homestead era took hold.
Which brings us to Edgar Garwood, 91, who has been painstakingly leveling this land for more than six decades in a continual quest for the perfectly irrigated farm.
Edgar is still a working man, with a lithe body to prove it. But his face shows the stress of KXL, a project that has him boxed in whether he likes it or not.
Such is the luck of the draw on this stretch of the river. To Garwood’s east lies the massive Fort Peck Indian Reservation. And to the west, the massive Fort Peck Dam and Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge. Both are no-go zones for the pipeline and Garwood’s land appears to be the only viable alternative for Keystone XL.
During an afternoon visit, Garwood proudly showed what a lifetime’s work is all about: neatly carved channels that feed Missouri water into his gently sloping fields, most years doubling his yield of alfalfa and barley. And right next to the house, a prized personal patch of organic grain, which he harvests for his morning ritual of homemade whole wheat pancakes.
“I’m not signing anything. My biggest worry is my own water. I’ve depended on it my entire life and if anything goes wrong with that pipeline I’ll be ruined,” says Edgar.
Garwood’s son Ron, who farms near his father, is just as deeply set against the project over fears for the safety of the Missouri.
“Last year’s rains were so great that the pressure had to be released down the dam spillway — it came straight at us with such force it changed the shoreline right where they plan to bury the pipeline,” says Ron.
“Then just look at the other side — the pipeline has to climb hundreds of feet up through unstable glacial hills. Where do you think the oil goes if there’s an event that ruptures the pipe?”
TransCanada has tried to address such concerns, insisting the pipeline will plunge from its normal depth of 1.3 metres to a full 8 metres as it passes beneath the Milk, Missouri and Yellowstone rivers. Heavier-gauge pipe, valve shutoffs on both sides of the rivers and reduced pressure are also part of the plan.
The Garwoods aren’t convinced. But like the rest of the holdouts up and down the line, they may have no choice.
“They threaten to use eminent domain (expropriation) if we don’t go along with it,” says Ron.
The forced surrender of one’s land is a sensitive subject anywhere. But the issue takes on added meaning here in the deeply conservative Great Plain states, where property rights are next to Godliness — and landowners normally count on Republicans to protect them.
The Garwoods have joined dozens of other Montana holdouts to form the Northern Plains Landowners Group to negotiate with TransCanada. But what they’re looking for is assurances, not money.
“If there was a huge benefit for the country it might be different,” says Ron. “But I just don’t see it. The jobs claims are wildly overstated and most of the oil seems intended for export from the Gulf Coast to the global market.”
Williston, N.D.
A slight detour east is in order. Because nobody can truly appreciate the intensity of the KXL until they take a look at the Bakken, America’s most frenzied domestic oil boom.
Though the epicentre of the rich Bakken shale is just over the North Dakota border near the town of Williston, wildcatters are now spilling into eastern Montana, South Dakota and even southern Saskatchewan. And the first glimpse of activity — a Koch Industries semi-trailer — is evident on Highway 2 barely 45 minutes down the road from the Garwoods.
Suddenly, as we continue eastward, the whole world begins to change. By the time we reach Culbertson, the road is jammed with oil tankers, industrial duty pickups and crew cabs. We scramble to find the last motel room in a three-hour driving radius.
“Incredible, isn’t it?” says Dave Rudh, 68, a transplanted Californian who left his two struggling restaurants behind for a slice of the Bakken boom.
“There’s a truck going by every 10 seconds. I love it. My brother and I are buying houses and fixing them up to rent out to the crews. Nobody can find a place to stay. Everywhere you turn, there’s an opportunity to make money.”
Three weeks ago, North Dakota eclipsed Alaska to become America’s second-leading oil producer behind Texas — 17.8 million barrels in March, or a daily average of 575,490. And while the frenzy has driven North Dakota’s jobless rate to the lowest in the nation, those barrels are selling at a substantial discount. The infrastructure has yet to catch up with the production, forcing Bakken producers to rely on truck and rail to transport the oil to market.
That’s where Keystone XL comes in, with a planned intake pipe at Baker, Mont., that TransCanada pledges will absorb as much as 65,000 barrels of Bakken oil each day, adding it to the Alberta flow all the way to Texas.
Like all booms, this one comes with controversy. Clusters of “man camps” have sprouted throughout the region as hundreds of companies scramble to keep the now more than 7,000 wells in service.
Williston has mushroomed to more than twice its normal size, as have the surrounding oil towns, and the influx has brought not only congestion but crime to a region where many never before locked their doors.
The growing pains came into high relief in March with the grisly discovery of missing Montana schoolteacher Sherry Arnold, who was kidnapped, strangled and buried in a shallow grave after vanishing during a morning jog in the oil town of Sidney. Two men from Colorado who arrived looking for work in the oil fields have been charged with abduction and murder.
The other dimension of controversy is fracking — hydraulic fracturing — which together with recent developments in horizontal drilling technology have enabled the runaway Bakken boom. Fracking involves unleashing an explosive chemical cocktail at depths of 4,000 metres, thereby blasting the shale apart to release trapped oil and gas. The oil is gathered, awaiting outlets such as KXL. But as much as a third of the gas is simply wasted through flaring due to the absence of infrastructure.
The sheer pace of activity amounts to a fracking free-for-all. North Dakota state officials recently warned they are “understaffed, overwhelmed” and struggling to provide adequate oversight of the thousands of waste disposal sites sprouting throughout the oil patch.
Yet the Bakken boom is expected only to accelerate as oil companies deepen their involvement. It has left towns like Tioga, an hour northeast of Williston, wondering what hit them.
All around Tioga the gravel roads are thick with the dust of passing trucks. And a “man camp” of white trailers stretches the length of town. The fracking has set some in this once-sleepy farm community on edge while others suddenly are finding themselves on easy street, thanks to monthly cheques from the mineral rights of the new resource.
Ella Strahan is among those whose finds herself with extra money, thanks to a lucky strike on her family homestead just west of Tioga. She’s reluctant to speak numbers, except to say “it’s not enough to live on” and in any event, she’s passing it on to younger members of the family.
Now in her late ’80s, Strahan can speak from the experience of having witnessed two oil booms in these parts — the original wave that followed the discovery of oil in 1951 and the present-day frenzy. And to hear her tell it, the first time around was far less frantic.
“The oil companies had patience in the 1950s. Houses were built, the school was expanded, the town got ready for the influx — and then the men came in with the families,” says Strahan.
“That’s not the way things are now. The men move in and find a place wherever they can. They leave their families behind. Prices are going up for everyday things like milk and bread and rent and hitting people the same, no matter whether they’re on a fixed income or working in the oil business. It’s all happening in too much of a hurry this time.”
Tioga Mayor Nathan Germundson is just 32 and never lived through the first boom. But he says Strahan’s assessment is right on the money.
“The horse has left the barn on this one. And now we’re trying to play catch-up with our planning.
“We want to keep an eye on the fracking so no lasting harm is done. And at the same time, a lot of these guys are literally choking down wells to wait things out because there’s no capacity to move the oil.
“That’s why you won’t hear any objections to Keystone XL around here. We need all the help we can get with infrastructure and capacity. We’re bursting at the seams.”
Cogswell, N.D.
Another detour, this one longer, sadder. Over to the other end of North Dakota, picking up the path of TransCanada’s original Keystone pipeline.
Launched into service in June, 2010, Keystone 1 is a narrower pipe than the XL version now under discussion. But it too carries Alberta bitumen, though the line terminates in Illinois.
But in its short lifespan, Keystone 1 has already proven time and again the golden rule of pipelines — they leak. No fewer than 14 times since the ribbon was cut, in the case of Keystone 1.
That’s an ugly number for a two-year-old pipeline. And while most of the releases were tiny, the one that left the most chilling impression happened early one morning in May, 2011, when 20,000 gallons of crude burst from a pumping station near the tiny hamlet of Cogswell.
It could have been worse. Much, much worse. Like what happened a year earlier, when TransCanada’s competitor Enbridge leaked 20,000 barrels of Alberta’s finest—barrels, not gallons — into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River, contaminating 55 kilometres of the waterway and costing, thus far, $765 million in remediation.
We meet up with nearby farmers Bob Banderet and Paul Matthews at the Cogswell spill site. It was Banderet who first witnessed the gusher spouting “two tree-tops high” — 20 metres — and immediately called TransCanada’s spill hotline.
“The first thing they said to me was, ‘Is this a hoax?’” recalls Banderet. “Eventually, I was put through and reported the emergency.”
Thirty minutes later, TransCanada’s engineers were able to stop the gusher with an emergency shutdown. Five hours later, the first cleanup trailer arrived, eventually swelling to a 24-man crew.
Not a trace of the spill can be seen today. Except on the faces of Banderet and Matthews, who both look like they have seen a ghost.
They’re upset, not only because TransCanada’s final summary on the incident scrubbed Banderet’s role as mere visual confirmation of a problem their monitoring teams were already aware of and remedying. But also because a senior TransCanada executive subsequently gave an interview dismissing reports of a gusher on Keystone 1 as fallacy.
“They said my call didn’t matter because they already were in the process of shutting down, which I highly doubt. Then they said I didn’t see what I saw — oil shooting into the sky,” says Banderet.
Adds Matthews: “My idea of good faith is to say, ‘Okay, TransCanada — release the recordings.’ Show us the tape with the date-stamp proving you were on the case. If they want to rebuild trust, that would be a great first step.”
Sisseton, S.D.
We could use some comic relief at this point. And we find it a few hours later at the Buffalo Wallow Bar & Grill in Sisseton, S.D., as we head south back to KXL proper.
Four lads in full hunting regalia are well into the beer, partying amongst themselves — until they overhear a Star team discussing Keystone XL.
“We’re a pipeline crew from Michigan. That’s what we do! Can you get us a job on Keystone XL?” one shouts.
Probably not, we answer. But we ask about their story anyway. It turns out the boys are not welders, engineers, crane operators or pipelayers, per se. They are non-specialized labourers who do whatever else needs doing. Hard work. And pay so generous that it enables them to wander to places like South Dakota to hunt turkey between jobs.
Their last paying work was in the fracking fields of Pennsylvania’s Marcellus shale, building a gas pipeline. They loved the work but hated the way they were treated.
“People don’t like pipelines in Pennsylvania. They called us ‘gasholes.’ That’s why we want to get to Keystone XL. Around here, people are just friendlier to working guys like us.”
Newport, Neb.
Nebraska. All this way, and not once has a single person we have encountered brought up the phrase “climate change.” Not even to deny it, let alone compare believers to the Unabomber.
Odd, that. But soon to change, as we intersect with the inestimable Jane Kleeb, co-founder of Bold Nebraska. A thirtysomething Nebraskan mother of three, Kleeb and her team have fought an astonishing battle these past four years, effectively drawing the line against Keystone XL in the Sandhills.
Kleeb’s group has been engaged in an epic battle of wills with Keystone XL, exposing the project’s potential to export Alberta oil overseas, challenging exaggerated estimates of job creation and skewering the claim that the pipeline will bring lower gas prices to the U.S.
Yet Kleeb’s most effective work came in rousting Nebraska’s ranchers to rise up against Keystone XL on behalf of the Sandhills, where the all-important waters of the Ogallala aquifer are at their most vulnerable.
Walking alongside those waters with Kleeb and her self-styled band of stewards, it is easy to see why TransCanada lost its initial bid to traverse this delicate terrain. In certain areas of the Sandhills, the landscape is dotted with “flowing wells” — pumpless wonders that require only a pipe for pure, clear water to rise freely to the surface on its own.
What’s more, the people walking with Kleeb are anything but tree-huggers. Rather, they are fiercely independent cattlemen, the sort that in any other context would be voting Republican.
People like Karl Connell, a fifth-generation rancher from Newport, Neb., who is putting his everything into blocking KXL. Connell, like many ranchers, never goes near a computer. But Kleeb is a major tweep, with substantially more Twitter followers than TransCanada itself.
For TransCanada, that combination was deadly. And the noise these Nebraskans made, resounding and rebounding on social media, proved the clincher in Obama’s decision in January to cancel the original Keystone XL application.
Kleeb and her Nebraska rancher friends managed to deliver what more than 1,000 high-profile arrestees could not when they stormed the White House last summer in protest against the oilsands — give Big Oil a black eye.
“I don’t think they ever suffered a defeat like they did when Obama blocked the pipeline,” says Kleeb.
She describes the opposition as a “unique and powerful coalition — it can’t just be the tree-huggers. We need moms, we need ranchers, we need farmers to win this fight.
“There was no secret to it. Right from the beginning, we were meeting landowners in living rooms and church basements. We weren’t just an environmental group looking to use a rancher’s face on a poster. We truly believe we are standing together to defend their land and our water.”
Yet barely two months later, under withering Republican attack as an “anti-energy, anti-job” president, Obama all but crushed the spirit of the Nebraskan rejectionists by traveling to Cushing, Okla., to tout his administration’s “all-of-the-above” energy policy. Though he had no direct jurisdiction over the matter, Obama vowed he would do everything possible to accelerate construction of the southern half of the Keystone XL pipeline.
Simultaneously, TransCanada officials huddled anew with Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman. And by May, seemingly unkillable Keystone XL was alive again — TransCanada submitting fresh applications with a slightly modified plan to skirt the outer edge of the Sandhills.
A 70-kilometre detour is not a victory in Bold Nebraska’s eyes. And it’s especially grim for Connell, whose sandy ranch north of the town of Newport — though not technically Sandhills, as defined by the state — looks to be in the crosshairs of Keystone XL just as they were before. He may actually end up with more pipe this time.
And so now they have entered the lawsuit phase, with Bold Nebraska challenging the constitutionality of Heineman’s decision to drive through a new law, LB 1161, that essentially grants him sole authority to approve TransCanada’s plan for Nebraska.
For many who oppose the pipeline, the David-vs.-Goliath achievements of these Nebraska holdouts remain a thing of wonder. But there are others who are beginning to regret the whole anti-oilsands campaign.
Carrie La Seur, a blogger with the Plains Justice group, went ballistic, declaring that by turning Keystone XL into a big election-year political issue, “Big Green played it all wrong.”
“It’s weakened the standing of one of the best environmental presidents,” La Seur wrote, pointing to Team Obama’s regulatory action on everything from coal ash to air quality.
“It’s not paradise, it’s politics. But it’s a far cry from the regressive environmental and energy policies we’d get from anybody in the GOP primary. Did we really need to kneecap the president over this project?”
One might expect both sides in this fight to grasp at whatever ammunition they can find, rhetorical or otherwise. And while there’s no denying Canada has a massive stake in it all, the framing of the battle as a plain vanilla bilateral issue rings ludicrous. At least when groups like Bold Nebraska go on about TransCanada as a “foreign corporation” ramming something on unsuspecting Americans.
Alberta’s oilsands production is now more than two-thirds foreign owned, according to new research by the B.C.-based Forest Ethics Advocacy, with more than half of the oil and gas revenues flowing out of Canada to people like the aforementioned Koch brothers.
Likewise, the Gulf Coast refineries lining up to absorb and process the surge of KXL bitumen range from American to Saudi interests. Put another way, if this was about, say, Canadian softwood lumber, do you really think Newt Gingrich would be screaming like a steaming kettle about the urgency of bringing it south every time he steps up to a microphone?
It is Big Oil that wants it and Big Oil knows no country. And on this even Kleeb agrees.
But regardless of how the odds are beginning to stack up against them, KXL’s opponents vow at least one last battle awaits.
Says Kleeb: “You will see people protect their land at all costs. We’ve tried to explain how emotionally tied people feel to this land. Landowners will take direct action and I expect people from all over the country will come to Nebraska to join them. Safety should be a concern.”
For rancher Connell, the prospect of losing his rights through eminent domain suggests all bets are off. “You come in to my land, I’ll say, ‘No. You git.’
“Will it get physical? It might get physical. It might in fact get pretty ugly. Most people agree you should have the right to say, ‘No, leave me alone.’ Don’t be pushing me around.”
WHITEWATER, MONT.—Two orange pylons. A laughably scalable strand of knee-high barbed wire. A few deer in the distance. And not another human for miles.
That’s all that separates Canada from the United States here in northernmost Montana, where an unmarked gravel road meets the point where Keystone XL intends to cross south.
Looking north from Montana, a mere stumble will get you to Saskatchewan. One very easy step. But an illegal crossing is no way to begin a 4,000-kilometre journey into the heart of Keystone XL. So we took photographs and left.
Ten minutes deep into Montana, a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol van takes us down, lights blazing.
“We were there — but we didn’t cross,” I protest as the officers demand identification.
“We know — we were watching you,” one answers.
“Watching how? By drone? By satellite?” I ask.
A smile is his only answer.
Original Article
Source: the star
Author: Mitch Potter
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