* Vote still needs to clear plenary session
* Canada has lobbied for years against labelling plan (Adds industry reaction)
By Barbara Lewis
BRUSSELS, Dec 3 (Reuters) - Europe moved a step back towardsa plan to stigmatise Canada's tar sands as highly polluting onWednesday, despite years of Ottawa's lobbying the EU bloc aspart 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 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.
Industry group FuelsEurope, which welcomed the revisedCommission proposal in October, issued a statement saying itregretted Wednesday's vote and that it could create "hugeuncertainty" for fuel suppliers if the full parliament followedsuit.
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)
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