Imperial Oil managers planned to send over 200 giant factory parts from South Korea to Canada via the Pacific Northwest for the booming oil sands industry, not knowing they’d be stalled in Idaho.
Imperial Oil managers planned to send over 200 giant factory parts from South Korea to Canada via the Pacific Northwest for the booming oil sands industry, not knowing they’d be stalled in Idaho.
Now the first 34 shipments are lacking state highway permits and up against activist groups like Fighting Goliath and All Against the Haul.
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.
Imperial Oil remains determined. “Our bottom line is to move these modules safely and efficiently with a minimum of impacts on the people that we pass,” said Pius Rolheiser, a spokesman at Imperial’s Calgary headquarters.
Read more at OregonLive.com.
{biztweet}oil sands{/biztweet}
