Flickers of Life for Clean Fuels Standard as Oil Sands Plans Form

As concerns rise over plans to pipe Canadian tar sands oil to the East Coast for the first time, a dormant effort to clean up the region's fuels is showing new signs of life.

The Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management (NESCAUM) has accelerated a project to crunch the full "life cycle" carbon emissions of vehicle fuels used in the region—from their extraction through to their refining, transportation and combustion.

With the fuel tracker, NESCAUM hopes to advance a clearer picture of the transport sector's sizable—and growing—contribution to regional greenhouse gas emissions.

The new data, expected to be released later this year, could be the underpinning of a climate policy several years in the works called the Clean Fuels Standard.

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