There must be solutions with less severe tradeoffs than shale gas and tar sands oil.
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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.
Sent me to town in his car to get tar and took the gas out my pay.
Meanwhile, back in North America, new techniques were being developed to extract oil and natural gas from shale formations deep underground, from tar sands in Canada, and from deep water in the Gulf of Mexico.
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.
Unconventional sources of oil and gas that are set for further exploitation include Canada's tar sands, shale and coal-bed methane deposits around the world.
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.
Some hours north of where I am on a trip with BACKROADS, a travel company based in Berkeley, California, sits the vast and controversial Canadian tar sands containing vast amounts of oil and natural gas, which are some day going to be sent through an 1800 mile pipeline to the Louisiana Gulf Coast that the US State Department has just approved.
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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It is estimated that by 2012 tar-sands operations will consume two billion cubic feet of natural gas a day, or enough to heat all the homes in Canada.
Originally they were derived from coal-tar, the black viscous waste product left over from distilling coal for gas.
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