"It is an all-out war to battle TransCanada and keep them off our property," said Luebbe, whose family raises black angus cattle on a 1,200-acre ranch in the Sand Hills of Nebraska. "It is not in the national best interest for anyone except the money hungry, greedy corporation of TransCanada."
Luebbe's statement — at once angry and determined — was typical of the emotional testimony U.S. State Department officials heard on both sides of the Keystone XL issue during a raucous public hearing on the $7 billion project.
Several hundred people — from labour union supporters to anti-oil environmentalists and alienated landowners — crowded into a basement auditorium of the Ronald Reagan Building to make a final plea for approval or rejection of the 2,700 kilometre pipeline.
Outside the hearing site, another 300 or so people — including some who drifted over from a nearby anti-Wall Street protest on Pennsylvania Avenue — held a lunchtime rally demanding rejection of the project.
It was the last of nine Keystone XL sessions held over the past two weeks by administration officials weighing whether the 830,000 barrel-a-day pipeline — which would run from northern Alberta to the Gulf Coast of Texas — is in the U.S. national interest.
Three years and three environmental reviews after TransCanada first applied for a presidential permit to build Keystone XL, the Washington hearing should have had an air of finality to it. Almost no one, however, expects the fight to stop with a State Department yea or nay.
"There will be litigation," said Luebbe, who has refused TransCanada's requests for an easement to build the pipeline across her ranch near Stuart, Neb.
"If they think we are going to roll over for them, they've got another thing coming," added Randy Thompson, another Nebraska landowner who has not granted TransCanada permission to cross his property.
The sheer intensity of the controversy over Keystone XL has surprised TransCanada, which completed an earlier U.S. phase of the pipeline — Keystone 1 — with relatively little opposition in 2010.
Russ Girling, TransCanada's president and chief executive officer, said on Friday his company "would never have expected" Keystone XL to become such a lightning rod in the green movement's campaign against fossil fuels.
Girling, in an interview, said Keystone XL has been the victim of bad timing, caught in a wave of public concern caused by last year's BP oil disaster in the Gulf and the spill of 800,000 gallons of oilsands crude from an Enbridge-operated pipeline in Michigan.
But Girling said opponents — including those who live in the six states along the proposed pipeline route — have been "misled" by environmental leaders whose primary goal is to end consumption of all fossil fuels.
"This debate is really misguided," Girling said. "There is literally two and half million miles of pipeline traversing the ground (in the United States). You would think, based on the arguments that have come up, that this is the first pipeline that has ever been built."
The State Department already has given the environmental green light to Keystone XL, finding in its final eco-impact study that the pipeline would have "no significant impact" on natural resources in the U.S.
With the promise of up to 20,000 jobs and increased energy security, Girling said Keystone XL should "win hands down" if the administration makes its decision based on facts.
"It seems to me right now what the United States needs in addition to energy security, it needs economic stimulus and jobs coming from the private sector . . . I think rational, thinking Americans understand those kinds of facts," Girling said.
Bob Van Der Valk, a petroleum industry consultant who travelled from Montana for Friday's hearing, said Keystone XL would make the U.S. "more energy secure from countries that are hostile to us and that don't particularly care for our cultures."
Opponents painted a far different picture during Friday's hearings.
Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth, accused government officials of providing unfair access and advice to TransCanada officials with political ties to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — a charge her department has adamantly denied.
"Are these hearings simply a farce? Are they a parody of the government process, and a parody of the rule of law?" Pica demanded.
Nebraskans attending the meeting expressed fear about the damage a major spill would have in the eco-sensitive Sand Hills and the Ogallala Aquifer, which provides the state with 80 per cent of its drinking water.
"You can take a pile of horse manure and sprinkle flower seeds on it, and you can call it a rose garden, but it doesn't change what it really is," said Thompson, whose ranchland sits on the pipeline path near Nebraska's Platte River.
"The oil industry and their pals in Congress, they've been out buying seed by the truckload, and they are spreading it all over this thing. But it doesn't change what the pipeline really is . . . a project being built for the benefit of big oil companies."
The State Department has promised a decision on Keystone XL by year's end. TransCanada is already preparing for legal action likely to follow a favourable ruling.
"I fully expect that when and if we get issued a positive decision, there will be those that will file appeals to that decision in some form or fashion," Girling said.
"But once we get those permits, it would be my expectation that we would commence construction very quickly after that."
Girling challenged recent accusations from Keystone XL opponents that the pipeline, rather than providing oil for the U.S. market, is being built to the Gulf Coast so Canadian producers can sell oilsands crude to China.
The TransCanada executive said the oil will simply replace diminishing supplies of Venezuelan heavy crude for Texas refineries that need it for domestic use.
"This notion that we built a pipeline for export, it's absolutely ludicrous," Girling said.
"There are not Chinese buyers lined up for our crude oil at some terminal on the Gulf Coast."
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