Plans back on the agenda by voting
European Parliament lawmakers put the plans back on the agenda by voting against the EU executive's proposal to abandon the scheme.
The veto vote was passed at committee level, meaning it still has to get through a full session of the European Parliament in the coming weeks in order to force the European Commission to come up with a new proposal. Getting plenary agreement would be much harder than clearing a committee.
In October, the executive Commission published a new plan for reporting the greenhouse gas intensity of transport fuels, which removed a requirement to have separate values for different types of oil.
That meant tar sands, also known as oil sands, would no longer have to be differentiated from conventional crude, with lower overall greenhouse gas emissions, and that it would make it much easier for the unconventional oil to reach the European market.
Canada and representatives of the oil industry have said unconventional oil has a valuable role in diversifying EU supplies and that Canada's huge deposits of oil sands, being developed by oil majors such as ExxonMobil, BP and Royal Dutch Shell, were being unfairly singled out by the original EU plan.
They welcomed the revised Commission proposal in October.