TransCanada CEO Russ Girling can rattle off a batch of numbers without taking a breath: 20,000 jobs, 118,000 spinoff jobs, $20 billion in economic stimulus and $5.2 billion in incremental tax revenue to states.
Those are the benefits that the pipeline company says will flow into the United States from Canada's oil sands if the Department of State allows it to build the Keystone XL pipeline. The 1,660-mile system would carry crude from Alberta to the Texas Gulf Coast.
Girling has four more months to spout off the jobs-and-revenue stats until Secretary of State Hillary Clinton makes the final call.
No doubt environmental groups will repeat their own set of numbers while both sides wait it out: 20 leading climate scientists pleading with President Barack Obama to deny it, two leaks on the original Keystone pipeline this spring, two major oil spills by other companies in the past year.
Bill McKibben, a top climate change activist, hopes to draw more than 1,000 opponents of Keystone XL to a two-week protest outside the White House starting August 20.
"It's on the short list of worst ideas ever," McKibben told me last week, adding that it destroys Alberta's boreal forests and jeopardizes sensitive areas across the Midwest. "The problem for everybody else not living along the route is that it's the second-biggest pool of carbon on the earth. If we tap into it in a serious way, we're never going to get our climate problem under control."
The protesters have been told to dress in business casual to avoid being labeled radicals and to show up willing to get arrested.
Despite the increasingly vocal opposition, Girling is confident that Clinton will grant the permit.
"I can think of no good reason that this project would get denied," he told me Tuesday. "We're going to go through a public-interest determination, and I think hands down, this project is in the national interest of both the United States and Canada, and that's the conclusion the authorities will come to."
Girling called McKibben's cohorts "misguided" for fighting the $7 billion project on the grounds that it would accelerate oil sands mining and cause a spike in air pollution.
"The opposition has tried to characterize this as an oil-versus-alternatives debate or an environment-versus-jobs debate," he said. "Make no mistake, that resource is getting developed. It's the single-greatest driver of the Canadian economy. If the US doesn't want the oil, then somebody else will."
Stopping the project does not eliminate US demand for 10 million b/d of oil imports, he said.
"That's not going to change anytime soon," he said. "It's a question of whether you want Canadian oil or you want oil from other places around the globe that don't necessarily share the values which would include environmental protection, protecting rights of workers and other things that Canada strongly stands behind."
Responding to environmental groups who call oil sands one of the world's dirtiest energy sources, Girling said emissions at the Alberta mines amount to a tenth of one percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and less than 2% of carbon emitted from US coal-fired power plants.
He said the alternative would create more air pollution.
"Denial of the pipeline means we'll see a million barrels a day more shipped into the Gulf Coast via tanker, and we'll see a million barrels a day move off the west coast of Canada to foreign markets," he said. "That will create increased tanker traffic on the water and an increase in emissions of GHGs."
McKibben agrees that some oil sands extraction would continue if Clinton denies the project. But he said the most opponents can hope for is that in blocking Keystone XL, they buy time for either Congress to enact climate legislation or for the general public to reconsider the costs of fossil fuels.
"It's sort of like finding Saudi Arabia again," he said. "There's almost that much oil there. The difference is when we found Saudi Arabia, we didn't know anything about global warming. We didn't realize it was a dangerous thing we were doing."
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