Washington (Platts)--15Sep2009/203 pm EDT/1803 GMT

A coalition of environmental groups wants US President Barack Obama to call for a "moratorium" on Canadian oil sands development when he meets with Canadian Prime Minster Stephen Harper at the White House on Wednesday.

In a conference call with reporters Tuesday, Rick Smith, the executive director of Environmental Defence Canada, said he would like to see the Canadian government "stop hitching its wagon to the tar sands industry.... I'm hoping that the US government tells Canada to take a hike when it comes to special deals for the tar sands."

Obama and Harper are scheduled to talk about energy, global climate change and other issues when they meet at the White House on Wednesday. Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, the Canada program director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the oil sands issue will be the "elephant in the living room" when the two leaders sit down to talk.

"Tar sands oil production produces three times the global warming pollution as conventional oil per barrel, and has extremely destructive impacts on water, land and public health," Casey-Lefkowitz said.

Canada produces about 1.2 million barrels per day of oil from oil sands fields located primarily in Alberta. About 70% of that production is shipped to the US and refined into gasoline and other transportation fuels.

Casey-Lefkowitz said this is "undermining" the push by Obama and his Democratic allies on Capitol Hill to pass climate-change legislation that reduces greenhouse gas emissions from refineries, the transportation sector and other aspects of the US economy.

PUSH TO BLOCK US LEGISLATION IS CITED

The House of Representatives passed a climate-change bill in June that would require US industries to reduce their heat-trapping emissions by 80% by mid-century. Casey-Lefkowitz and other activists said Tuesday that the Canadian government and Canadian energy companies are vigorously lobbying the US Senate to jettison a provision in the House-passed bill that is viewed as hostile to the Canadian oil sands industry.

"We want to see Canada withdraw its tarry finger from our climate legislation," Casey-Lefkowitz said.

The green groups also criticized the Obama administration for issuing a permit that allows Enbridge Energy, a Calgary-based oil company, to build a pipeline from oil sands fields in Alberta to refineries in the US Midwest.

Several environmental groups are suing the US Department of State for issuing a border-crossing permit for the pipeline, saying the agency did not properly account for the environmental impacts of the line. The groups recently asked a federal court in California to block Enbridge from working on the US portion of the pipeline while the litigation proceeds, but the judge denied their bid. Another hearing in the case is scheduled for September 25.

The call Tuesday for a moratorium on oil sands development came as about 25 activists from the environmental group Greenpeace locked themselves to a dump truck and other heavy equipment at Shell's Albian Sands open-pit mine in northern Alberta. Mike Hudema, a Greenpeace spokesman, said the protest was designed to tell Obama and Harper that "the tar sands are a devastating example of how our future will look unless urgent action is taken to protect the climate." --Brian Hansen, brian_hansen@platts.com