Brussels, 21/02/2012 (Agence Europe) - Canada is threatening to bring a complaint to the WTO against the EU if it includes oil extracted from tar sands in its legislation. The Province of Alberta is the world's largest producer of this, in a category which is more polluting than other sources of crude oil.
In a letter written in December 2011 by its ambassador to the EU, David Plunkett, to Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard and published this week by the European section of the green NGO Friends of the Earth, Canada threatens to go before the WTO against a possible decision of the EU aiming, for climate protection reasons, to restrict the entry onto the European market of tar sands through its future revised rules on fuel.
With the world's third-largest reserves of tar sands in the west of the country, in the Province of Alberta, Canada is in the sights of the proposed revised EU directive on the quality of fuels, which plans to increase its calculations of the greenhouse gas emissions of non-conventional fossil fuels in order to reduce their environmental impact. It particularly targets tar sands and shale gas, controversial in Europe. The new rules would particularly target European importers of oil from tar sands or shale gas and European producers of this variety of oil. Although it currently exports very little oil to the EU, Canada is planning to triple its production between now and 2020.
Canada is therefore believed to be prepared to explore all possible avenues to defend its interests, including going before the WTO, if a new European measure on fuel should target oil from tar sands “in a discriminatory, arbitrary and non-scientific way”. In a letter to Energy Commissioner Günther Oettinger in October 2011, Canada's Minister for Natural Resources Joe Oliver lamented the “absence of credible scientific evidence” to differentiate between tar sands and other fossil fuels imported to the EU, in terms of CO2 emissions relative to their production. (EH/transl.fl)