All oil is bad, but some is worse. Here’s the difference. | Grist
▻http://grist.org/news/all-oil-is-bad-but-some-is-worse-heres-the-difference
Though all oils are dirty, some are dirtier than others. High-profile case in point: the Canadian tar sands. The fact that tar-sands oil is one of the filthiest oils in the world has helped fuel the debate around the Keystone XL pipeline.
The good folks at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace thought someone had better analyze which oils were a bad idea to extract, and which oils were a really, really, really bad idea to extract. CEIP teamed up with Stanford and the University of Calgary to develop an oil-climate index; the result of their work is documented in a new report titled “Know Your Oil.”
The team found that there’s at least an 80 percent difference in greenhouse gas emissions per barrel between the worst oil researchers looked at and the least worse. The worst, by the way, is Suncor Synthetic H — unsurprisingly, a type of tar-sands crude from Alberta. The least damaging oil they looked at is from the Tengiz field in Kazakhstan.
▻https://grist.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/ghgemissions.jpg?w=660&h=770
