Future oil refining in the U.S. may soon get much dirtier–including three times more greenhouse gas emissions in the extraction process–as refineries place their bets on a shift away from traditional crude oil to Canadian tar sands, according to a major new report issued today.
The Environmental Integrity Project (EIP) in conjunction with Toronto-headquartered Environmental Defence Canada (EDC) released the report, which notes that two-thirds of the currently proposed increase in U.S. refining capacity of 1.6 million barrels per day (bpd) would come from refining heavier, dirtier crude oil from Canadian tar sands.
At the same time, more than 800,000 bpd of existing U.S. conventional crude capacity is proposed to be converted to processing oil from tar sands, so that conventional crude refining capacity is expected to undergo a net decrease of over 300,000 bpd, and the total net increase in refining capacity to come from tar sands would be over 1.9 million bpd.
Since the average capacity of an oil refinery in the United States is 116,395 bpd, the contemplated 1.9 million bpd of increased tar sand capacity would be equivalent to constructing more than sixteen new refineries dedicated to tar sands.
Eric Schaeffer, director, Environmental Integrity Project, said, “It is hard to imagine what else it is that the U.S. oil industry could do to go backwards further and faster than to rely on Canadian tar sands or similar resources in the United States. Not only would this mean significantly more pollution overall, but it would substantially boost the greenhouse gas emissions linked to global warming.”
Although a new oil refinery has not been built in the U.S. for over 30 years, five new refineries are currently under consideration, three of which would process tar sand oil (two in North Dakota and one in South Dakota), and one of which would process oil from U.S. oil shale deposits (North Dakota), which may be as destructive to mine and as dirty to refine as tar sand oil.
Matt Price, project manager for Alberta/BC Energy and Climate and contributor to the new report, Environmental Defence Canada, said, “The tar sands project is the most destructive project on Earth. Nowhere else are we talking about ripping up an area the size of Florida, creating massive toxic lakes you can see from space with the naked eye, and giving off three times the greenhouse gas emissions to produce oil when compared with conventional crude.”
The EIP report, titled "Tar Sands: Feeding U.S. Refinery Expansions With Dirty Fuel," outlines several recommendations:
- The U.S. government can and should act to address the environmental consequences of tar sand and oil shale development.
- The U.S. EPA should regulate greenhouse gas emissions from oil refineries pursuant to the “New Source Performance Standards” (“NSPS”) applicable to newly modified or constructed oil refineries.
- The U.S. EPA should limit greenhouse gas emissions and consider alternatives to tar sand oil feedstock in its “best available control technology” (“BACT”) and “lowest achievable emission rate” (“LAER”) determinations under the “new source review” (“NSR”) provisions of the Clean Air Act when issuing construction permits for refinery expansions or new refineries.
- When permitting the pipelines to carry tar sand crude to U.S. refineries, the responsible U.S. environmental and public lands agencies should consider the cumulative effects on air quality and global warming of all U.S. refineries which process tar sand oil, as well as the global warming impacts of extraction of tar sand crude in Canada on the United States.
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