[Vision2020] Megaload company to start bitumen extraction in Canadian oil sands

[Tom Hansen]

#%!&\/| \/\/#!~ \/\/#\¥+# ! !   
(And you can quote me on that)

Courtesy of the Missoulian (Missoula, Montana) at:

http://tinyurl.com/dy7apla
 
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Megaload company to start bitumen extraction in Canadian oil sands

The saga of the megaloads in Montana and Idaho reaches a milestone in Canada this weekend.

All those loads of oil processing modules that caused such commotion down here for nigh on three years are assembled and ready to crank in far northeastern Alberta, Canada.

Imperial Oil Ltd., a Canadian arm of ExxonMobil, says the long-anticipated first barrel of bitumen extracted from its open-pit mining operations at the Kearl Lake Oil Sands project will come any day.

“We are continuing to make progress toward safe completion of start-up activities and we continue to expect first oil production by the end of March,” Imperial spokesman Pius Rolheiser told the Missoulian on Friday.

That left just two days, but Rolheiser was no more specific. There was no further word Saturday.

Rolheiser said there are more than 5,000 people at the site more than 300 miles north of Edmonton. They’re working to get what’s purported to be 40 or 50 years of mining up and running, and also building an adjacent expansion project, which is already 30 percent complete.

The first of three froth treatment plants will fire up first. It’s capable of producing 50,000 barrels a day, and the other two will bring production to 110,000 barrels a day over the coming months. When the second phase is in place, the company expects production to reach 345,000 barrels a day. That’s the rough equivalent of 1.4 million gallons.

Imperial missed its own deadline to launch production by the end of 2012. A frigid winter and transportation “complications” in Montana and Idaho were blamed, and costs of the first phase of the decades-long project have bounded from $8 billion to $10.9 billion to $12.9 billion.

Most people in western Montana and Idaho had never heard of Kearl Lake, the Athabasca Oil Sands, or the environmental controversies raging over the tar sands in late 2009. The term “megaloads” hadn’t even been coined.

Representatives of Imperial Oil came to Missoula that Nov. 9 to unveil plans for a yearlong transportation project set to start the following fall. Mammoet, a Dutch transport company, would move more than 200 oversized loads of oil sands processing equipment fabricated in South Korea, Imperial Oil executive Harry Lillo told county commissioners.

The big rigs would be up to 162 feet long, 24 feet wide and 30 feet high, and they’d travel through Missoula on Reserve Street from the Port of Lewiston, Idaho, over Highway 12, then on to Alberta via two-lane highways 200 and 87. They’d been designed in modules too tall to fit under interstate overpasses, Lillo said, and no other routes – rail, road or air – in North America would do the trick.

Eyes were opened. Rallies were held. Protests were staged.

The route through the Clearwater and Lochsa River country in Idaho; Lolo Creek, the Blackfoot Valley and the Rocky Mountain Front in Montana was studied with new eyes.

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“I would say that without the proposed Kearl transportation project it probably wouldn’t have been front-page news where you’re discussing the megaloads of the tar sands and some of their broader impacts,” said Kyla Maki of the Helena-based Montana Environmental Information Center. “The opposition and the challenges brought some of that home to a lot of Montanans, especially in western Montana.”

Though Imperial/Exxon’s travel plan received go-aheads from the Idaho and Montana transportation departments, legal challenges stalled it. The loads were eventually downsized and rerouted, at substantial cost to the oil company.

Many more than 200 not-so-mega loads passed through Montana with little notice on I-90 and I-15 in 2011 and 2012, the last ones arriving last summer at their destinations near Edmonton to be reassembled.

The saga still reverberates, on both sides of the Bitterroot Range.

“We megaload opponents recognize that, as shippers like Mammoet carrying equipment for corporations like Imperial Oil continue sending inquiries to ITD and MDT about using Exxon’s planned and prepped ‘high and wide’ corridor, our fight must continue,” said Borg Hendrickson of Kooskia, Idaho.

Hendrickson and her husband, Linwood Laughy, formed The Rural People of Highway 12 and garnered national attention in their dogged battle against the Kearl Module Transportation Project. Missoula-based All Against the Haul arose and joined the fight.

A federal judge in Boise ruled in February that the U.S. Forest Service unlawfully remained above the fray when the Idaho Transportation Department decided to permit the megaloads in 2010.

The Forest Service has yet to respond to the ruling. Hendrickson said the battle won’t be over until the agency assumes its jurisdiction over the Lochsa-Clearwater country and agrees to stop “the industrialization of the corridor.”

***

According to Missoula attorney Bob Gentry, Montana’s fight focused attention on a process overwhelmingly enacted by the state Legislature in 1971.

“As Imperial Oil celebrates the opening of production at the Kearl tar sands project, it should be remembered that the Montana Environmental Policy Act did its job,” said Gentry, who represented the Montana Environmental Information Center and the Montana Chapter of the Sierra Club in the lawsuit filed by Missoula County against the Montana Department of Transportation and Imperial/Exxon.

The right of the public to participate in the environmental review process doesn’t exist everywhere, including Idaho, said Maki, MEIC’s clean energy program director.

“That was another thing that came out of this whole thing. You could see the contrast between the states and their governing processes – even though we had MDT, which was very compliant with Imperial Oil in their decision-making,” she said.

Montanans have serious concerns about the environmental and social impacts of the tar sands, Gentry said, but no state court could have stopped tar sands development in another country.

“But asking a project proponent to bear the costs of their project rather than externalizing those costs to others seems a fair proposition, not just in Canada but in Montana too when a foreign project involves our state,” he said. “If a project like the tar sands is to proceed, shouldn’t the entity that stands to profit by it bear the costs of making it happen?”

MEPA doesn’t provide a means to review the environmental impacts of the water-intensive mining in the tar/oil sands region.

But the megaload controversy served to shine a spotlight on them.

“It’s impossible to ignore what the end use of something that size moving through our communities will be,” Maki said. “People are aware of that.

“I would say what’s wrong with raising concern about where these things are going, whether that concern is climate change or the devastating impact the tar sands have on indigenous communities in the Athabasca region? You can’t be blind to those impacts.”

As for megaloads themselves, the Montana Legislature has taken steps to clear a way for them. House Bill 513 would eliminate MEPA review of all oversized load transports.

Missoula County and MEIC opposed the bill, but both the House and Senate have passed it. Maki was able to inject an amendment to say it applies to loads using right of way along existing roads.

“It probably sounds more egregious than it is,” she said. “It could be argued that if they’re going to have to build turnouts to the extent Exxon did, they’d still have to go through the MEPA process.”

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Processing equipment at the Kearl Lake Oil Sands mining project in northern Alberta stands ready to begin production. Hundreds of modules that went into construction of the plant passed through Montana in 2011 and 2012.



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Seeya round town, Moscow, because . . .

"Moscow Cares" (the most fun you can have with your pants on)
http://www.MoscowCares.com
  
Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho

"There's room at the top they are telling you still 
But first you must learn how to smile as you kill 
If you want to be like the folks on the hill."

- John Lennon
 
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