A judge has ruled that a Canadian subsidiary of Exxon Mobile cannot ship equipment along Montana’s Highway 12 to an oil-sands field in Alberta, Canada. The shipment has been halted at the Idaho-Montana border since April, when environmental groups and concerned Montanans sued to stop its progress. The materials include roughly 200 truckloads of enormous 30- by 100-foot structures that Imperial Oil will use to build a new refinery at the Kearl oil-sands site. Imperial had planned to truck the structures, which were manufactured in Korea, into Canada via Montana’s scenic Highway 12, a rural road that traces part of the route used by Lewis and Clark. The ruling arrives on the same day that Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer created a panel to review the safety of underground pipelines running through the state. On July 1, an , releasing 42,000 gallons of oil into the Yellowstone River. That spill sparked protests by environmental groups and led members of Earth First! to on July 12. Oil sands, a thick mixture of sand, clay, and bitumen, a form of petroleum, are more expensive and environmentally damaging to extract and refine than traditional crude oil. A surge in petroleum prices in recent years has made Canada’s oil-sands reserves, which are among the largest in the world, increasingly profitable.
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