EU vote puts Canadian tar sands label back on the agenda

* Vote still needs to clear plenary session

* Canada has lobbied for years against labelling plan

By Barbara Lewis

BRUSSELS, Dec 3 (Reuters) - Europe moved a small step backtowards a plan to stigmatise Canada's tar sands as highlypolluting on Wednesday, despite years of Ottawa's lobbying theEU bloc as part of its export drive.

European Parliament lawmakers put the plans back on theagenda by voting against the EU executive's proposal to abandonthe scheme.

The veto vote was passed at committee level, meaning itstill has to get through a full session of the EuropeanParliament in the coming weeks in order to force the EuropeanCommission to come up with a new proposal. Getting plenaryagreement would be much harder than clearing a committee.

In October, the executive Commission published a new planfor reporting the greenhouse gas intensity of transport fuels,which removed a requirement to have separate values fordifferent types of oil.

That meant tar sands, also known as oil sands, would nolonger have to be differentiated from conventional crude, withlower overall greenhouse gas emissions, and that it would makeit much easier for the unconventional oil to reach the Europeanmarket.

Canada and representatives of the oil industry have saidunconventional oil has a valuable role in diversifying EUsupplies and that Canada's huge deposits of oil sands, beingdeveloped by oil majors such as ExxonMobil, BP and Royal Dutch Shell, were being unfairly singled outby the original EU plan.

They welcomed the revised Commission proposal in October.

Environmentalists and some politicians cite researchfindings that over its life-cycle oil sands crude emits morecarbon dioxide because of the amount of energy required toseparate the crude from the bituminous deposits in which theyare found.

"If the EU is serious about tackling climate change itshould discourage the development of these highlygreenhouse-gas-intensive unconventional fossil fuels," saidGerben-Jan Gerbrandy, Dutch member of the Group of the Allianceof Liberals and Democrats for Europe, who initiated Wednesday'svote. (Editing by Philip Blenkinsop and William Hardy)