With dozens of carbon-intensive tar sands projects delayed or on hold, a new report released Friday confidently declares: “The case for the tar sands is crumbling.”

A new analysis by Oil Change International identifies 39 projects—representing more than 1.61 million barrels per day (bpd) of potential tar sands oil production capacity—that companies are currently unable or unwilling to invest in.

That’s good news for the climate and the environment, as well as for frontline communities that bear the brunt of the toxic tar sands production.

And it’s bad news for the tar sands sector, which now finds itself “struggling to justify many new projects,” says Hannah McKinnon, senior campaigner on private finance at Oil Change International.

According to the report, (pdf), the delayed and on-hold projects include three open pit mine projects with a combined capacity of over 450,000 bpd, and over 30 drilling projects with nearly 1.2 million bpd capacity. The total extractable tar sands oil in these projects is almost 13 billion barrels. If all of that resource was extracted and burned, around 7.8 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide would be emitted—equivalent to 40 years of emissions from 51 average U.S. coal-fired power plants.

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