Actually, it won't be sold to the highest bidder. Those nasty, evil oil speculators that everyone likes to badmouth will have bought contracts to buy or sell that oil months in advance. Their overall effect is to stabilize prices by lessening sharp short term spikes or dips on the "spot market" which changes minute to minute. They smooth out the peaks and valleys. Airlines frequently hedge fuel prices by buying large quantities of fuel months in advance. If the price goes down, they lose money. If the price goes up, they make extra profit. Either way, their cost is more predictable.
We import roughly $350 billion worth of oil per year. The Keystone pipeline will reduce our imports from OPEC (people who don't like us) by 7 to 13 percent. That means we're sending 30 t0 40 billion dollars a year less to the OPEC countries. Would you rather your money go to Canada or Venezuela and the Middle East?
"Big Oil" you know, those people everyone loves to hate, operate on a profit margin of about 8%. Almost no other industry (except for health insurance companies who we also love to hate) operates on such a small margin. They make billions of dollars because they have spent hundreds of billions to find, produce and refine the crude. If you have a 401K or pension, chances are you're a stockholder and share the profits from nasty old "Big Oil".
The Keystone pipeline will cost around $7 billion, and most of that money will be spent in the U.S. Estimates range from 3500 to 20,000 direct jobs paying taxes to the U.S. Ancillary jobs (Meals, motels, pickup trucks, tools, pipe, fittings, heavy equipment and all the other things needed to build the pipeline) could be as high as 200,000. Millions of dollars which will be taxed will be paid to landowners for easements, and the pipeline company will be paying more millions in taxes to the states that the pipeline passes through.