EXCLUSIVE / Anti-tar sands demonstrations have begun outside a Spanish refinery that will receive the first major European shipment of Canada’s tar sands next week, and activists are refusing to rule out direct action to stop it. The 600,000 barrels of Western Canada Select (WCS) heavy blend crude, is being shipped by the Spanish oil company Repsol to the port of Bilbao, from where it will be taken to a nearby refinery in a heavily-populated area. Europe currently imports around 4,000 barrels per day (bpd) of tar sands, but studies suggest that could rocket to 700,000 bpd by 2020, due to the planned Keystone XL pipeline linking Alberta’s tar sands fields to Texas.
