Canada's tar sands may to be just too dirty

Capturing and storing some of the carbon that would be released in the processing of Canada’s tar sands may not clean the industry up. To turn the vast but dirty resource into useable oil, Canada will have to spew vast amounts of greenhouse gases.

That’s the conclusion of a new study on the potential of so-called carbon capture and storage technology to reduce carbon emissions from tar sands operations.

The Athabasca tar sands of north-eastern Alberta, Canada, hold more than 170 billion barrels of recoverable oil, second only to Saudi Arabia’s reserves. However, the oil is in the form of tarry bitumen that requires a great deal of energy to extract and turn into usable oil