FORT MCMURRAY, ALBERTA - For decades, the U.S. has vowed to reduce its dependence on imported oil and to find a reliable source to meet the nation's growing oil needs.

Now, Canada offers a solution.

While oil supplies are dwindling in some places, or disrupted by hurricanes, threatened by terrorist attacks or controlled by hostile governments, Alberta's oil sands -- a patch of forest about the size of Florida with a sea of oil beneath it -- produce more crude than all the wells in Texas or Alaska.

With more than 170 billion barrels, the oil sands are the second-largest proven reserves in the world after those in Saudi Arabia.

Because of the Alberta oil sands, Canada has become the largest supplier of crude oil to the United States. The oil sands are booming, and production is expected to triple in a little more than a decade.

Also growing are the environmental costs -- higher greenhouse gas emissions than conventional oil and long-term destruction of a swath of deep forest. In the past few months, Alberta officials have announced new environmental policies and plans to invest $4 billion Canadian ($3.7 billion U.S.) to cut emissions.

"We're an energy province. We're now producing record amounts of oil. We have the potential to actually increase our production of oil," said Alberta energy official Christopher Holly.

"So one of the things that's beginning to happen," Holly said, "is we're beginning to recognize the need to take a look at the entire energy framework ... to look at the balance between being a supplier and also being an environmental steward."

Demand for fuel in North America will keep oil sands production growing from 1.2 million barrels a day in 2007 to 3.5 million to 4 million barrels a day by 2020, said Alberta Oil Minister Mel Knight. "I don't see anything on the horizon that would indicate that isn't a target that's doable."

Oil companies are expanding so fast in Alberta that the three big players -- Suncor Energy Inc., Syncrude Canada Ltd. and Albian Sands Energy Inc. -- have built their own airstrips to ferry in temporary construction workers. Exxon Mobil Corp., Royal Dutch Shell PLC and many other companies have investments in the big operators.

Workers from all over Canada, plus miners from South Africa and oil workers from Venezuela, have moved to Fort McMurray. Housing costs are sky high. The boomtown of 65,000 has an additional 27,000 temporary workers living in camper trailers and motels.

About 200 square miles have been mined, close to the Athabasca River.

But most of the thick crude oil lies farther from the river, too deep to be scraped off. Here the thick oil is heated by steam piped underground so that it can be pumped.

The sands contain a form of crude oil called bitumen that's as thick as peanut butter. To remove the sand and clay to turn the bitumen into heavy crude that can flow to refineries takes a lot of energy.

For that reason, greenhouse-gas emissions from production are three to five times those of conventional oil.

Alberta's environmental officials forecast that with the new policies in place, the province's emissions will increase until 2020 and then decline to 14 percent below 2005 levels by 2050. Global targets based on the 2007 findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are 50 percent to 85 percent reductions from 2000 levels.

Other environmental concerns are with the Athabasca River and the forest.

Preston McEachern of the province's oil sands environmental management division said oil sands production has not harmed the river.

David Schindler, an ecology professor at the University of Alberta, said it's not true that no mining pollution reaches the Athabasca. He challenged the government's handling of its data and said new studies are under way about pollutants in the river and whether the mining companies draw out too much water when the river is naturally low.

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