Ian Jackson for The New York Times
A Canexus terminal near Bruderheim, Alberta.
HOUSTON — Over the past two years, environmentalists have chained themselves to the White House fence and otherwise coalesced around stopping the Keystone XL pipeline as their top priority in the fight against global warming.
But even if President Obama rejects the pipeline, it might not matter much. Oil companies are already building rail terminals to deliver oil from western Canada to the United States, and even to Asia.
Since July, plans have been announced for three large loading terminals in western Canada with the combined capacity of 350,000 barrels a day — equivalent to roughly 40 percent of the capacity of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that is designed to bring oil from western Alberta to refineries along the Gulf Coast.
Over all, Canada is poised to quadruple its rail-loading capacity over the next few years to as much as 900,000 barrels a day, up from 180,000 today.
The acceleration has come despite a derailment in the lakeside Quebec town of Lac-Megantic in July, in which a runaway oil train bound for a refinery in eastern Canada exploded, killing dozens of people and bankrupting the railway company. That accident and others more recently have renewed concerns about the safety of transporting oil by rail, and given an added argument to some who favor the Keystone XL pipeline.
"They don't give up," Jesse Prentice-Dunn, a Sierra Club policy analyst, said of the oil industry.
If all the new terminals are built, Canada will potentially increase its exports to the United States by more than 20 percent — even if Keystone XL is never built.
Shipping by rail can cost an additional $5 or more per barrel, but oil companies have decided that they cannot afford to wait.
"The indecision on Keystone XL really spawned innovation and mobilized alternatives, and rail is a clear part of the options available to our industry," said Paul Reimer, senior vice president in charge of transport and marketing at Cenovus Energy, a Canadian oil company that is planning to increase rail shipments from 7,000 barrels a day to as many as 30,000 barrels a day by the end of 2014.
Opponents want to stop the pipeline project to keep the oil sands in the ground. They say that emissions from development — through mining or steam heating out of the ground followed by upgrading for shipment — are more harmful than those that come from extracting most conventional crude oil. Proponents say that Canadian heavy oil is no more environmentally harmful than some crude oils already used in the United States, and that it would replace similar crudes from Venezuela and Mexico that are refined on the Gulf Coast.
But now it seems that even if environmentalists win their battle over Keystone, Canada is destined to become an even more important energy provider, one way or another.
The developing rail links for oil sands range across Canada and over the border from the Gulf Coast to Washington and California. Railways can potentially give Canadian producers a major outlet to oil-hungry China, including from refineries in Washington and California.
At least that is the hope of Canadian oil companies, which now depend almost solely on the United States for exports.
"We want to diversify our markets beyond just moving our product south," said Peter Symons, a spokesman for Statoil, a Norwegian oil giant that has signed contracts to lease two Canadian oil loading terminals. "We can get that product on a ship and get it to premium markets in Asia."
Several Washington and Oregon refiners and ports are planning or building rail projects for Canadian heavy crude as well as light oil from North Dakota. The Texas refinery giant Tesoro and the oil services company Savage have announced a joint venture to build a $100 million, 42-acre oil-handling plant in the Port of Vancouver on the Columbia River that could handle 380,000 barrels of oil each day if permits are granted.
At the beginning of the year, only a trickle of Canadian oil was transported by rail, no more than 60,000 barrels a day. There was limited rail off-loading capacity in American refineries outside the Gulf Coast, and only a small number of rail cars suitable to transport bitumen, the raw substance in oil sands that can be refined into petroleum products.
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