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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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.
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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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.
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.
The Line 9 hearing comes as two other potential routes for tar-sands oil face problems.
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.
For their calculations, the two assumed that where there was a gap between demand and conventional supply it would be filled with synthetic fuels, first with tar-sands oil and later with oil from coal and shale. (According to high-end estimates, coal and oil shale could together yield some ten trillion barrels of unconventional crude.) They then calculated what the impact would be on global carbon-dioxide levels.
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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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 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.
Bitumen, otherwise known as tar sand, is oil-soaked dirt that needs to be cooked to extract the oil.
Extracting oil from tar sands causes more carbon emissions than traditional drilling.
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.
He has batted away all criticisms of the Albertan tar sands, where oil extraction is an especially dirty business, and placed his faith in carbon capture and storage, an unproven and expensive technology.
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.
They have worked out how to squeeze oil from the tar sands of Alberta.
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Investment is pouring into the tar sands, but potential oil exports will outstrip pipeline capacity by 2015.
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.
Light sweet crude is depleting quickly, and now the industry is going after heavy crude and tar sands and thermally enhanced oil.
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.
While some beaches contain remnants of the spill (Louisiana's Elmer Island still has tar balls), any oil that does wash ashore is quickly removed by BP crews.
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.
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