Vermont motorists will soon be filling their tanks with gas increasingly derived from dirty Canadian tar sands oil, saysa new report from the Natural Resources Defense Council. This means that despite strong concern in Vermont over tar sands crude flowing through the state via a reversed Portland-Montreal pipeline, the state could nonetheless suffer a backdoor inflow of tar sands oil’as refined fuels.
A flood of dirty fuel into Vermont would also undercut its efforts to reduce carbon pollution. The NRDC report found that under current plans, tar sands-derived gasoline supplies in 11 Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states, including Vermont, would soar from less than one percent of the total in 2012 to 11.5 percent of the total by 2020, due to increased imports from Canadian refineries, fresh supplies of refined tar sands fuels from Gulf Coast refineries, and quantities from East Coast refineries that would obtain tar sands crude via rail and barge.
An influx of carbon-intensive fuels into Vermont and the rest of the region, which in 2012 was virtually tar sands free, will hurt the efforts to combat climate change, which has already caused billions of dollars in damage, according to the report, ‘What’s in Your Tank? Northeast and Mid-Atlantic States Need to Reject Tar Sands and Support Clean Fuels.’
‘If Vermonters use gasoline made from tar sands sources, we’ll be working against ourselves in terms of cutting down on our global warming pollution,’ said Johanna Miller, the energy program director for the Vermont Natural Resources Council. ‘Much of the work being done in Vermont communities ‘ going solar, retrofitting our homes and businesses and far more ‘ would be for naught if we used more of this climate-killing, high-carbon source of gasoline.’
Jim Murphy, senior counsel at the National Wildlife Federation’s Vermont office noted the massive destruction caused by tar sands mining.
‘Tar sands expansion ‘ which requires leveling the land and stripmining the fuel - is threatening to turn much of North America’s most productive bird nursery into a Mordor-like wasteland,’ he said. ‘We need to keep this dirtiest of fuels in the ground, not in our tanks.’
Vermont’s climate action plan calls on the state to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent in 2028 and by 75 percent in 2050. While Vermont’s emissions are dropping, much of those carbon savings could be effectively squandered by using gasoline from tar sands, which emits 17 percent more carbon pollution than conventional gasoline when measured on a life-cycle basis.
‘Dirty gasoline supplies in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic are set to rise significantly, unless states take steps to keep out high-carbon fuel,’ said Danielle Droitsch, NRDC Canada Project Director. ‘By 2015 the volume of tar sands-derived fuel in the Northeast could grow sixfold, compared to 2012. This shows how important it is to move as quickly as possible to clean energy of all types.’
The new Gulf Coast Pipeline, which will bring tar sands crude from Cushing, Oklahoma, to refineries on the Gulf Coast, makes it even more urgent for communities and policy-makers to take action to keep tar sands out of the region, she said.
If the controversial Keystone XL pipeline for tar sands oil from Canada to the United States is approved by President Obama, the region’s share of gasoline from tar-sands crude could rise even further, according to the report.
The report said that state leaders with the support of citizens and local communities need to take steps to clean up transportation.
The extraction and refining of oil from Alberta’s vast tar sands region, an area the size of Florida, is an energy-intensive process that destroys carbon-trapping forest lands and emits 81 percent more carbon pollution than conventional oil extraction and refining. NRDC and others oppose Keystone XL, which would carry Alberta’s tar sands oil through the heartland of America to Gulf Coast refineries, in part because it would enable a vast expansion in tar sands production. As NRDC hasexplained, Keystone XL is primarily an oil export pipeline, but some portion of its refined products would flow to the East Coast.
If dirty tar sands gasoline becomes a major share of supplies in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, that would add millions more tons of carbon pollution to the atmosphere each year’just as the region is aiming to cut such pollution under the landmark Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a nine-state pact, including Vermont, to combat climate change by reducing carbon pollution from power plants, according to the report. Hurricanes Sandy and Irene’the type of extreme weather that will become more frequent with climate change’have already wreaked billions of dollars of damage in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states.
The report also underscores the importance of promoting a wide variety of low-carbon and no-carbon transportation alternatives, from cleaner fuels to buses and rail, bike lanes and pedestrian-friendly planning.
Source: VNRC January 23, 2014
NRDC: Tar sands fuel is headed for Vermont
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