Minister says EU was behind oil sands opposition

Ron Liepert, minister of energy for government of Alberta, gestures during the Oilsand Summit in Calgary, Alberta, March 23, 2010.

CALGARY (Reuters) - Alberta's energy minister said on Wednesday that the European Union is the organization he referred to when he asserted that some international groups were using the environment as a guise to erect trade barriers.

Ron Liepert, energy minister in the Canadian province that is home to the country's oil sands production, told the Reuters Oil Sands Summit a day earlier that "certain groups" were trying to block expansion of markets "behind the camouflage of environmental correctness, to re-establish trade barriers."

He did not disclose the identity of the groups, but his spokesman wrote in an email on Wednesday that Liepert said it was indeed the EU, after Reuters reported that the organization had yielded to Canadian demands that it remove possible trade barriers to avoid further damage to ties.

Canada has warned that draft EU standards to promote greener fuels are too unwieldy and would harm the market for oil sands crude. The EU appears to have heeded the warning, dropping references to oil sands.

Canada's oil sands are the largest crude deposits outside the Middle East and a growing source of supply for the United States.

However, environmental groups have mounted international campaigns warning of the unconventional energy source's impact on air, land, water and local communities.

The Alberta government and energy industry have countered with their own communications push to hammer home their efforts to improve the oil sands' environmental performance while balancing that with the industry's importance to the Canadian economy.

(Additional reporting by Pete Harrison in Brussels)