The Obama administration's delay in ruling on the Keystone XL oil pipeline until after the 2012 election may mark only a temporary victory for environmentalists who rallied to kill the project -- but that may not matter to a constituency already geared up for long-term maneuvering against Canadian oil sands development.

Indeed, the grass-roots lobbying tactics that greens employed to press the State Department for more review of a pipeline hotly pursued by Canada's government as well as business groups, are aligned with those they used to stall this year's multiple GOP efforts to weaken U.S. EPA's power to curb emissions. Even as Keystone XL's sponsor and other backers vow to keep pushing the $7 billion pipeline, those conservationists are just as primed to keep playing defense against plans to boost exports of oil sands fuel that they have branded as too dirty for U.S. consumption.

"Tar sands is on the map now for the environmental community," Sierra Club associate campaign director Kate Colarulli said, using greens' preferred term for the underground bitumen that makes Canada's estimated fuel reserves second only to Saudi Arabia's. "For environmentalists, this fight wasn't about Keystone XL -- it was about tar sands."

The year-plus extension of a review for the 1,700-mile XL link, which would nearly double U.S. import capacity for oil sands crude, Colarulli added, gives groups that organized against Keystone more time "to build public opposition" to oil sands use. "I would have loved for the president to say, 'This is a no'" on the pipeline, she said, "but ... it's a good thing when your government says, 'We realize we bungled the process and what we're going to do is make sure we get it right.'"

In officially announcing a fresh look at Nebraska routing for the pipeline, the State Department defended itself against charges from many pro-XL corners that the Obama administration had chosen to push a decision past the 2012 election to avoid angering its environmentalist supporters.

"We're being responsive to what we've heard from the public," Assistant Secretary of State Kerri-Ann Jones told reporters Thursday, referring to pushback against siting the pipeline in the midst of Nebraska's Sandhills region. "We don't have a route that would avoid what many feel is a unique resource in Nebraska, and we feel we need that route to make a decision."

The proposed pipeline was one of several issues Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper discussed at a regional summit in Hawaii yesterday.

"The president underscored his support for the State Department's announcement regarding the need to seek additional information about the Keystone XL pipeline proposal to ensure that all questions are properly addressed and all the potential impacts are properly understood," the White House press secretary's office said last night.

For the interest groups that battled for months to sway the administration's ruling, however, the Keystone XL delay was anything but a simple routing matter.

Bill Day, spokesman for refiner Valero Energy Corp., lamented in a statement that the postponed permitting decision was "due to a small and misguided group of extremists who fail to realize that fossil fuels will continue to be consumed because they are efficient and economically viable."

American Petroleum Institute President Jack Gerard aired similar sentiments, telling reporters that State's announcement amounted to "trying to appease a very small, shrill group" of opponents and suggesting that XL sponsor TransCanada Corp. could withdraw its pipeline proposal rather than take further financial hits from the delay.

"If you're a businessperson and looking at a process that has this much discretion in it and can be driven by political considerations, you've got to think twice about risking shareholders' assets" on keeping the project alive, Gerard said.

Yet on a political level, a TransCanada abandonment of Keystone XL would send environmentalists from a partial win to a full-fledged David-and-Goliath upset against a better-funded enemy, an outcome that oil sands foes are eager to see.

"I know that revisiting the flawed review process will result in the right answer: America does not need to deepen our oil addiction with this tar sands pipeline," Natural Resources Defense Council President Frances Beinecke wrote Friday in a Huffington Post op-ed. "And as we await that final decision, we have succeeded in closing the spigot on more than a half million barrels of the dirtiest oil on the planet every day."

Just as oil sands supporters and opponents have sought to undercut each other's projections of the jobs that Keystone XL would create (E&E Daily, Oct. 24), both sides use different data to describe the extra emissions generated by oil sands production relative to conventional fuel. Industry and other interests point to a study by energy analysts at IHS CERA that showed no more than a 15 percent uptick in emissions from oil sands fuels, while greens such as Beinecke point to other production-focused studies that show an emissions difference as great as 300 percent.

That numbers game over the oil sands is poised to intensify as the 2012 election approaches, despite the appearance of a lull stemming from State's announcement. Climate activist and 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben, who helped spearhead this year's anti-XL organizing, already has vowed to continue his public campaign to kill the pipeline, and Colarulli of the Sierra Club said that environmentalists would move some of their energies to opposing future oil sands pipelines such as the Wrangler link planned by Enbridge Energy Partners LP.

Daniel Weiss, climate strategy director at the liberal think tank Center for American Progress, said that "a portion of this effort will now focus on other pipelines that would also expand production of tar sands oil." But he added that green activists whose support for President Obama was galvanized by the XL delay are also likely to translate that energy into other advocacy campaigns.

"This will create some space and free up resources for communicating President Obama's efforts to decrease our dependence on oil to the American people," Weiss said.