Tar Sands Fuels: Threatening to Set Back Northeast and Mid-Atlantic Region Climate Achievements
Today, NRDC – along with 15 other local, regional and national groups – released a new report entitled What’s in Your Tank? Northeast and Mid-Atlantic States Need to Reject Tar Sands and Support Clean Fuels. The report brings to light a major new threat to the region: without action by citizens and policy-makers, the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic will have 11.5% of their petroleum-based transportation and heating fuels coming from tar sands by 2020. Further, if the Keystone XL pipeline is approved, and just a small portion of the fuel derived from Keystone XL’s tar sands crude flows to the Northeast, the portion of tar sands-derived fuels in the region could skyrocket to 14-18%. Because tar sands-derived fuels cause 17% more greenhouse gas emissions than conventionally sourced-fuels over their full life-cycle from extraction through burning, this could be a major setback for a region that has embraced carbon emission reductions with programs like the landmark Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a nine-state pact to combat climate change by reducing carbon pollution from power plants.
Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states are currently almost “tar sands free.” As of 2012, tar sands accounted for less than 1 percent of the region’s fuel supply, but even as soon as 2015, tar sands could grow to account for 5% of the region’s fuel supply. Unless we take action to stop it, this invasion of tar sands will happen in several ways:
- Tar sands crude oil will be sent to the U.S. Gulf Coast through the existing pipeline network, along with Keystone XL if it is approved, be refined on the Gulf Coast, and then sent as fuel to the Northeast via the Colonial Pipeline and other means.
- If the reversal of Enbridge’s Line 9 and the Portland-Montreal Pipeline are approved, and if TransCanada’s Energy East Pipeline is approved, more tar sands could be sent to the East for refining in Eastern Canadian refineries and Northeast and Mid-Atlantic refineries that supply the region.
New Report: Oil Industry Plans to Pump Refined Tar Sands to Maine
“It’s outrageous that the oil industry expects Mainers to fill up our gas tanks with tar sands, given all of the opposition to shipping tar sands through the Sebago Lake watershed and out of Casco Bay,” said Emily Figdor, director of Environment Maine, which co-sponsored the report. “We’re not going to sit back and let the oil industry bring the dirtiest, most carbon-intensive oil on earth to Maine. We’re committed to keeping Maine tar sands-free.”
A new NRDC report finds Massachusetts poised to import dirty tar sands gas
Massachusetts 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 Massachusetts) would soar from less than one percent 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 Massachusetts and the rest of the region, which in 2012 were 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.”
“This report is an urgent wake-up call, one that Massachusetts must heed in order avoid wiping out recent gains in reducing transportation sector carbon pollution,” noted Sue Reid, Massachusetts Director of the Conservation Law Foundation, which co-sponsored the report. “Tar sands-derived gas poses a direct threat to the Commonwealth’s transportation energy mix and our clean energy future.”
