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The $6.6-billion Gateway scheme, which would carry up to 525,000 barrels a day to a new marine terminal proposed for Kitimat, B.C., must forge a new path across two mountain ranges and hundreds of rivers farther north.

“If you’ve already got the right-of-way, right off the bat you’ve got less impact on the environment versus trying to cut a new route from Alberta all the way to the West Coast,” Mr. Pendill said.

“So it is absolutely helpful, but you’re still going to have, in my view, some pretty tremendous environmental opposition, simply because you are carrying more crude through a very pristine environment, and then you are talking about additional tanker traffic” on the coast.

A detailed facilities application for the Kinder Morgan expansion has yet to be filed with Canada’s National Energy Board.

But the supersized pipeline is in high demand to transport growing volumes of Alberta’s oil sands and related products to markets in California and Asia — away from the U.S. Midwest, which has been overrun by a fountain of tight oil unleashed from North Dakota’s Bakken formation and others like it.

Thirteen oil sands companies, including Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., Canadian Oil Sands Ltd., Cenovus Energy Inc., Imperial Oil Ltd., Suncor Energy Marketing Inc. and China’s Cnooc Ltd. (via its purchase of Nexen Inc.), have signed 15- or 20-year transportation agreements for capacity on the line, expected to be in service by 2017.