Pipeline impasse threatens Alberta's oil sands

The future of Alberta's oil sands hinges on two planned pipelines, but opposition is vocal and very influential

For all the wrong reasons, Enbridge is in the thick of two pipeline proposals – TransCanada's Keystone XL and its own Northern Gateway – that bear heavily on the scope and timing of oil-sands expansion. It is an unaccustomed role for a firm that has operated in a low-key fashion through most of its 60-year existence, while delivering billions of barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas to customers across North America and paying consistent dividends to its shareholders. Now, Canada's second-largest pipeline company figures large in the raging debate over plans to deliver oil-sands crude to the huge refining regions of the US Gulf coast and Asia (see Maps 1 and 2), which wou