HOUSTON -- Canada's natural resources chief delivered an impassioned defense of the oil sands industry at an event here yesterday.

Decrying celebrity environmentalists now waging a campaign against the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver said the oil industry and the Canadian government continue to improve the efficiency of tar sands operations.

He said oil sands developers are also rapidly reducing the global warming impact of their operations, and that soon, crude oil derived from Canada's fastest-growing energy source will be no dirtier than other oil supplies, from a carbon dioxide perspective.

The opponents now threatening a proposed pipeline to carry Alberta bitumen to Houston area refineries are out of touch with reality, Oliver said.

"Many are opposed to hydrocarbons, period, and are impervious to facts, science, economics and logic," Oliver told an audience of executives at business forum hosted by the World Energy Council. "But I still go to their movies."

Oliver said that so far, the oil sands industry has cut the greenhouse gas footprint of its operations by a third per barrel since 1990. He also dismissed complaints over the impact to the land in Canada's wild boreal forest caused from the scouring that must occur to access the crude trapped in the soil.

The area affected is only about the size of Chicago, he said, while the area of Canada's federally protected boreal forest is larger than California.

Oil sands can't be described as 'unconventional'

Oil companies are also "subject to rigorous regulatory review and prudent monitoring," Oliver added. He said that the rule that companies restore 100 percent of land to a natural state after excavating the oil sands they are after is one of the more strictly enforced rules, and he claims it is successfully rehabilitating affected areas.

"You would never know it had previously been a mining site," he said.

Oliver urged the audience of mainly oil and gas executives to help the Keystone XL pipeline plans to pass the final governmental hurdles and move forward. He especially appealed to Texas for the economic boon it could provide to the state, claiming that the pipeline project will alone attract $2.3 billion in new spending and boost the size of the entire state's economy by some $1.9 billion.

Oliver also suggested that the new light, sweet crude oil being pulled from tight oil formations like the Bakken in North Dakota could be transported via Keystone XL. Industry officials routinely complain that the only thing holding back the rapidly expanding shale oil drilling operations in the United States is the lack of storage and transport infrastructure.

The emergence of that energy source and the rise of the oil sands as a dominant source of energy in North America suggest that the oil and gas industry will have to change the very language it uses soon, Oliver said.

"The term 'unconventional' no longer fits."