Tar sands mines in Alberta, Canada, contain a reserve of 175 billion barrels of retrievable oil, making it the third-largest crude oil reserve in the world after Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. TransCanada, a Canadian gas and oil company, has proposed the construction of a pipeline called the Keystone XL that will transport the heavy crude oil over 1,700 miles from Alberta to refineries along the Gulf Coast. The construction is a $7 billion completion of the company’s existing Keystone Pipeline that will allow for stalled oil in Cushing, Okla., to flow south to be sold. The current Keystone Pipeline carries half a million barrels of oil a day, but its planned expansion would increase oil production to over 900,000 barrels a day. The Consumer Energy Alliance along with twenty-five other organizations in support of the Keystone XL project report submitting more than 450,000 comments from Americans calling on the U.S Department of State to allow construction of the pipeline on American soil. While proponents of the pipeline cite many potential benefits, other Americans oppose the Keystone XL, saying that TransCanada’s extortion of Alberta’s dirty tar sands threatens human health and the future of the environment.