managers thought they'd discovered a new

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

in Alberta's

, are wide as two-lane highways, taller than freeway overpasses and two-thirds the length of football fields.

to ship the behemoths to

, barge them upriver and unload them in

, 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.

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)

But Imperial finds its

stranded in Lewiston, lacking state highway permits to complete the U.S. portion of the trip and facing activist groups with names like

and

. Environmentalists are seizing the chance to rally U.S. opposition to Alberta's

, where miners wrest tarry deposits from sand and send about 780,000 barrels of petroleum a day to the United States.

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.

The enormous scale of just one tentacle of Alberta's

operations illustrates the lengths to which companies will go to procure oil after depleting reserves easily accessed by conventional drilling.

The

help make Canada the top U.S. oil supplier, providing a secure source of petroleum from a friendly democratic neighbor. But

companies do so at a cost, using large amounts of energy and water to extract and process

, a black tarry raw material. They discharge toxic wastewater, air pollutants and more

than are emitted when producing conventionally drilled oil.

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.

, a

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

.

"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

."

Opponents are well organized with legal backing.

Portland's Sulzer Pumps U.S. makes key pieces for proposed oil-sands pipeline

As

shipments languish in Lewiston, workers in Oregon assemble equipment for another colossal oil-sands project awaiting government action.

., the Portland-based arm of a Swiss manufacturer, is already making pumps for a $7 billion

proposed by

. The

line could carry

a day from the oil sands to U.S. Gulf Coast refineries.

Unlike Imperial, though, Sulzer has the work regardless whether the pipeline goes through.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is

early next year whether to authorize construction of

, which received the Environmental Protection Agency's

in a draft impact statement. U.S. senators Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., and Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., are leading members of Congress

of the pipeline.

"This toxic pipeline would put American drinking water, air and farmland at great risk," said Kate Colarulli,

dirty-fuels campaign director. "Building this pipeline would be like putting 6.5 million new cars on America's roads, right when we are making strides in fighting global-warming pollution."

If Clinton turns down

, pressure will increase for a double-barreled

that could carry 525,000 barrels a day from Edmonton to Kitimat, B.C., where tankers would depart for China and elsewhere.

also wants to

from Alberta to British Columbia to supply Washington, British Columbia and Asia.

The Keystone and Imperial debates are raising the oil fields' profile in the United States. The Sierra Club and other groups launched a national

last week opposing Keystone XL. Cosmetics giant

it would ask its transport partners to avoid high-impact, high-carbon fuels such as those from the oil sands.

Canada's government officials, launching their

, stress the oil sands' outsize economic impacts on the United States.

Oil-sands production will likely climb from 1.2 million barrels a day to about 4 million barrels in 2025, according to the

. Companies are expected to invest and spend $379 billion by 2034, the institute said, resulting in 343,000 new U.S. jobs by 2015 alone.

Sulzer, the pump manufacturer, won't reveal how much it will be paid for the 104 pumps it's making for Keystone XL.

Jack Feinstein, Sulzer's vice president of project management, said the company made 134 pumps for the original Keystone pipeline, which at more than 2,000 miles is one of the world's longest crude-oil lines. It's designed to bring petroleum from Alberta to refineries in Oklahoma and Illinois.

Together the Keystone and Keystone XL orders are the largest non-nuclear project Sulzer, with a century's history in Portland, has ever done.

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"I'm very concerned about the long-term effects of these heavy trucks on our federal highway infrastructure," said Patricia Weber, a Corvallis engineer who co-founded opposition group All Against the Haul.

Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., has

the U.S. Transportation Department to investigate the state permitting process.

"The oversized loads... will degrade highway surfaces and subsurfaces, damage bridges and road shoulders and dramatically increase maintenance and repair costs," DeFazio said. "I am opposed to subsidizing ExxonMobil oil-sands mining in Canada with taxpayer dollars."

,

director, said opposing highway permits because of oil developments outside the state is unusual. Lynch said the heaviest shipments would have less impact than people realize, distributing 600,000 pounds across 14 axles with eight tires each, for a total 112 tires.

A huge truck, a pusher truck, three pilot cars and two police cruisers would take nine nights to bring each load on the 510-mile route through Idaho and Montana. "They're moving at a time when most Montanans are in bed, between 2 and 5 in the morning." Lynch said. "At 2 a.m., the bars aren't even open."

Imperial's permit applications are mired in a thicket of state court decisions and bureaucracy.

The controversy has snagged separate shipments of giant coker-drum equipment that Clackamas heavy hauler

plans to truck from Lewiston to a

refinery in Billings, Mont. The four loads would travel partway on the same U.S. 12 route as the Imperial modules.

The ConocoPhillips debate went to the

, which returned it to the state transportation department. A hearing is planned in Boise Wednesday and Thursday.

"We're still sitting and waiting," said Mark Hefty, project development manager for Emmert, which specializes in large loads. "It's the first time we've ever run into anything like that."

Oil-sands critics are not generally trying to shut down operations. Instead The

, a Canadian research organization, calls for a pause on new approvals to give time to plan new projects responsibly and to reduce cumulative effects.

Until now the U.S. government has largely supported the oil sands. A

written by a U.S. diplomat based in Calgary said a secure U.S. oil supply was so important that Washington should shelve concerns about carbon emissions and support fitful attempts to "green" the oil sands.

"U.S. interests are best served by creating a context that facilitates the 'greening' rather than the suppression of oil-sands output,"

wrote in 2008, when he was U.S. consul general in Calgary. Huffaker subsequently quit the foreign service and works for the

.

Lobbyists for the Albertan and Canadian governments are trying to weaken clean-energy and climate-change policies in the United States and Europe to protect oil-sands interests, according to a

released this month by Climate Action Network Canada. The activist group said officials seek to undermine California's low-carbon fuel standard and U.S. and European clean-fuels policies.

Opponents say they often feel the deck is stacked against them, given the momentum behind projects, the money involved and growing world oil demand. That sense was reinforced last week as critics examined an official-looking document that appeared to predetermine Montana's approval of the Imperial Oil shipments.

The 76-page

, discovered on the Internet by

reporter

, includes responses to 22 areas of concern in some 7,200 public comments submitted last spring. Lynch, the Montana Transportation Department director, disowned the document, which is a "finding of no significant impact," or FONSI.

Computer technicians refer to the document as a "

," given that it's a Google-created version that lingered on the Web after disappearing from the transport agency's servers. Greg Robertson, public works director in Missoula county, where

the shipments, calls the document an "oops FONSI."

"Whoever wrote it sure knew what they were writing about," Robertson said. "I can't imagine it just magically showed up."

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