Fort McMurray Forum

An emissions report is no game-changer in the provincial government's fight against a proposed carbon-reduction strategy.

Politicians have touted their Jacobs Consultancy report as proof, the European Union Fuel Quality Directive is unfair in its discrimination against the oil sands.

But Marc Huot with the Pembina Institute says the government conclusions drawn from the research are flawed.


"And as we said, it does tend to focus on the better performing and more optimistic ways of producing bitumen from oil sands, so when conclusions are being made that the whole industry and all oil sands are getting much closer to conventional oil as they're concluding, we're seeing that's not really conclusion you can draw from this report because it's really only talking about sort of best case scenarios," said Huot.

Huot says the report fails to paint an accurate picture of the current emissions intensity of oil sands, by neglecting the volume of crude produced from each operation.