Killing Clean Energy Laws: Tar Sands Lobby Does Washington http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=15645

Tar sands from Alberta have enabled Canada to become the largest supplier of crude oil to the U.S. Tom Corcoran, a Washington lobbyist, is paid to promote this rapidly growing industry that produces some of the most emissions-heavy gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel on the planet.Barely a decade ago, most industry experts considered Alberta's oil sands a promising but marginal energy source. It was too costly to be developed on any major scale, and profits were too low to draw many of the big oil companies.

Now, rapidly rising oil prices are causing the industry to explode virtually overnight, hurling Alberta into the upper ranks of global petroleum suppliers.  The crude oil produced from the sands is not the smooth-flowing kind that bursts from the ground with the hit of a pick-axe. It comes instead in the form of bitumen, a sludgy mixture of clay, sand, water and oil.Some producers bulldoze miles and miles of boreal forest, mining the substance with industrial-scale shovels and dump-trucks the size of small buildings.

Others melt it out of place by pumping high-pressure steam and toxic chemicals deep underground. Even then the hockey puck-like gunk won't flow through pipelines until it's been heated to extremely high temperatures or diluted with natural gas condensate, a volatile hydrocarbon that contains cancer-causing benzene.There is high heat, too, in the debate about the environmental impact of tar sands extraction“The total picture,” University of Alberta water ecologist David Schindler wrote in 2008, “reveals that we have the Guinness World Record for environmental disaster on our hands.”  

While oil sands supporters admit that bitumen requires more energy to extract than higher quality crude oil from places like Texas or Saudi Arabia, they disagree about the numbers.The Alberta government claims that a recent European Union study concluding that greenhouse gas emissions are a full 23 percent more per barrel used out-of-date figures. Alberta puts bitumen's carbon footprint at only 5 to 15 percent higher than conventional oil.

“Frankly, we just feel on the surface it's just unfair,” Alberta energy minister Ron Liepert told Canadian media.For the U.S., with its notoriously fossil fuel-dependent economy, this brand new source of energy has created a complex dilemma. Environmentalists fear that cranking open the taps could wash away any chance of meaningful action against climate change. Some politicians, however, counter by pointing to the political and military risk of relying on oil from the Middle East and other prickly or unstable areas. They see salvation in privileged access to the planet's second biggest oil reserves -- in friendly Canada.