Tar Sands Equipment Pipeline Meets Intensifying Idaho Opposition - Leaked Doc. Outlines 1,000+ Loads

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Imperial Oil managers thought they'd discovered a new Northwest Passage when they decided to send more than 200 giant factory building blocks from South Korea to Canada via Idaho.

The largest of the massive modules, built as pieces of an $8 billion project in Alberta's oil sands, are wide as two-lane highways, taller than freeway overpasses and two-thirds the length of football fields. Imperial planned to ship the behemoths to Vancouver, barge them upriver and unload them in Lewiston, Idaho.

For $100 million or so, Imperial intended to relocate overhead wires in Idaho and Montana, build dozens of highway pullouts and haul each load in the dead of night to Canada. The route, on winding highways free of overpasses, would avoid a much longer journey through the Panama Canal, the Great Lakes and Minnesota. But Imperial finds its initial 34 shipments stranded in Lewiston, lacking state highway permits to complete the U.S. portion of the trip and facing activist groups with names like Fighting Goliath and All Against the Haul. Environmentalists are seizing the chance to rally U.S. opposition to Alberta's oil sands, where miners wrest tarry deposits from sand and send about 780,000 barrels of petroleum a day to the United States.

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Environmentalists oppose Imperial's mega loads on two main grounds, one being what they call permanent industrialization of Idaho and Montana scenic corridors, and the other being oil-sands impacts on Alberta and climate change. Bob McEnaney, a Natural Resources Defense Council public-lands expert, dug up Korean-language documents showing, he says, that over the next 10 years ExxonMobil expects another 1,000 massive factory modules made by South Korean company Sung Jin Geotec. "You're basically industrializing what is one of the nation's first wild and scenic rivers," said, McEnaney, referring to Idaho's Lochsa River. "We're opposed to the tar sands to begin with because of the climate impacts."

EDIT

http://www.oregonlive.com/business/index.ssf/2010/12/giant_oil_field_equipment_crea.html