Imperial to 'revisit' foreign input in oilsands

Remember when ...
Imperial Oil spokespeople said...
1. the modules are nonreducible;
2. they have no alternative routes;
3. South Korea is the best and pretty much only place the modules can be built;
4. they had no 'assurances' from Idaho & Montana transportation departments for transport permits.
Now read this... (especially note lines in bold... and you may also spot some lines to 'suspect' in italics...)

Imperial to 'revisit' foreign input in oilsands; Kearl project hit by logistical problems and protests over shipments of upgrader modules by road to Fort McMurray by Dave of the Edmonton Journal, published in the Calgary Herald, 3/30/11
EDMONTON - Imperial Oil will “revisit” its decision to buy massive modules from South Korea ... for the future expansion of its Kearl oilsands, its chief executive
... Bruce March said “we will revisit this for the expansion,” but added that his firm’s focus right now is getting the modules — stalled at the inland port of Lewiston, Idaho, amid protests from residents — on the road to Fort McMurray as soon as possible.

Currently, the $8-billion Kearl mine and bitumen production project is on time, scheduled to open late next year. Some of the modules made in Edmonton — which represents 80 per cent of the fabrication work — are ready to be shipped.
“We made the decision to order [the units from Korea] in the 2007-08 period ...
The Korean firm building the 207 mega-sized units — 33 of which are now being broken apart in Idaho ... so they can move as 60 smaller shipments on the Interstate highway — has supplied specialized ore-processing equipment to all oilsands plants in the past.

But in those cases the equipment has always been shipped in pieces and assembled in Edmonton.
March said Imperial could have done that with the modules, “but we opted to have it built in Korea. We could have gone either way.”
March said Imperial did its homework with the module transportation....
and got pretty good assurance from the state governments that they would allow it.”

But then came the protests, much of it from people opposed to the oilsands in general and rather than residents worried about the rural scenery. National advocacy groups have been sending out news releases for months denouncing the mega-loads....
...We are now seeing (protests) in the supply chain for the oilsands, in the pipeline projects like Keystone,” he said...

On Wednesday, commissioners in Missoula County, Montana, voted to file a lawsuit ... to stop oversized loads....
Read More:
http://www.calgaryherald.com/business/Imperial+revisit+foreign+input+oilsands/4531382/story.html?cid=megadrop_story