Production of oil from tar sands bitumen produces between three and five times the greenhouse gas pollution of conventional oil production.
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Extracting oil from tar sands causes more carbon emissions than traditional drilling.
And Canada is still fighting for an exemption from a rule inserted into the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act that bars the American government from buying fuels whose production causes more greenhouse-gas emissions than conventional petroleum sources, as producing oil from tar sands does.
The company that has been producing oil from the tar sands the longest is known as Suncor. (Suncor used to be a part of Sun Oil, now Sunoco, but today it is owned and operated independently.) One day this summer, I went to take a tour of its operations, which sprawl across several hundred square miles.
Also looming is a decision whether to grant a permit to the Keystone XL oil pipeline, which would transport carbon-laden tar sands oil from Canada to Texas.
They have worked out how to squeeze oil from the tar sands of Alberta.
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Environmentalists dislike the project chiefly because it would increase America's imports of oil from the tar sands of Alberta.
Oil shale and tar sands are other sources of liquid fuel that are harder on the environment than petroleum.
It avoided substituting Venezuelan heavy-tar oil used in Gulf Coast refineries with a similar product from near-by Canadian friends.
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These pipelines will distribute gas from the fracked shales and deliver oil from the tar sands, giving us the biggest energy boom in 60 years.
Unable to stop Canadian oil drilling and tar sand extraction programs, environmental groups are now trying to block any pipeline that is proposed out of the oil producing regions.
They will soon bioengineer bacteria to melt oil out of tar sands, turn grass into diesel fuel and scavenge natural resources of every kind out of low-grade, thinly dispersed deposits.
He plans to take a more active role in lawsuits challenging both federal and state governments on issues such as the use of oil extracted from tar sands in Alberta, Canada.
In the oil business, for example, Ceradyne is working to have its ceramics used to squeeze hydrocarbons from oil sands and tar, such those found in great quantity in Western Canada.
Not all of the oil turns to tar.
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Moreover, the sorts of fields that Western oil firms are starting to develop, in very deep water, or of nearly solid, tar-like oil, are ever more technically challenging.
There must be solutions with less severe tradeoffs than shale gas and tar sands oil.
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Scary emissions numbers related to the Canadian Tar Sands oil Keystone XL would carry trumpeted by activist groups like NRDC have little credibility.
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Earlier this year, Dole and Chiquita caught flak from activists after removing posts from their Facebook pages related to their consumption of tar sands oil.
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He wrote part of an energy bill passed in 2007 that seemed to ban American government agencies from buying oil produced from the tar sands.
The greens may not be able to stop the Canadians from extracting oil from the Alberta tar sands, but they would succeed in wiping out American coal-fired power.
Writers Lisa Song, Elizabeth McGowan and David Hasemyer were recognized for a project that began with an investigation into a million-gallon spill of Canadian tar sands oil into the Kalamazoo River in Michigan in 2010.
That day will mark a new crest in the rising tide of public demand for action, beginning with a definitive rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline that would enable the exploitation and export of Canada's tar sands oil.
And the president's equivocation on the Keystone XL pipeline, which was going to carry oil from the Canadian tar sands to the Gulf of Mexico but has now been stymied, was a textbook example of how to evade hard decisions in an election year.
While the pipeline project is a better alternative from a carbon pollution standpoint than shipping the oil by rail, the emissions created by harvesting tar sands, processing them into oil and eventually burning it in automobiles in the U.S. and abroad will contribute to global warming.
The Line 9 hearing comes as two other potential routes for tar-sands oil face problems.
Bitumen is the term for oil that is of a tar-like consistency and quality as it exists in an underground formation.
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Any tar balls or oil from natural seeps takes this same direction.
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While there are legitimate environmental worries, replacing gas exports with tar-sands oil is vital for economic growth, argues Matthew Akman, an analyst at Scotiabank.
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