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In July 2008, the Alberta government announced it would become a world leader in reducing greenhouse gases by spending $2 billion experimenting with carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) — the process of capturing carbon dioxide from industrial smokestacks, compressing it into a fluid and injecting it underground forever.
Know how much has been spent so far? A billion? One hundred million? Ten million?
How about $760,000.
Of the $2 billion announced with great fanfare and optimism 28 months ago, the government has so far spent just .038 per cent of the money — on administrative costs and something called a “knowledge-sharing framework.”
At this rate, it’ll take 6,000 years for the government to spend it all, which is probably about the same time the government will bring in a serious greenhouse gas reduction strategy.
Spending so little is great news if you question the wisdom and safety of injecting millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide underground. But not so great if you thought the government was moving quickly to find a way to curtail the carbon dioxide emissions that, thanks to the energy industry, are the fastest growing in the country.
No matter where you stand on this issue, the amount of money spent so far — or, rather, the amount of money not spent so far — demonstrates just how difficult it is to get a CCS project off the drawing board.
Every one of the Alberta government’s four test projects — partnered with the federal government and private firms — remain firmly attached to the board, mere gleams in the eyes of engineers.
They have yet to move beyond the letter of intent stage and put a shovel in the ground. They are all about putting lawyers in a room to work out a deal. Government officials are hopeful contracts will be signed late this year or early next, but at this point, the government is not ready to hand over money for an experiment that might not work. Thus the only thing sequestered so far is the $760,000 of taxpayers’ money.
The government, though, is moving forward on other fronts.
This week, it introduced Bill 24, the Carbon Capture and Storage Amendment Act, which would have the province accept liability for CCS projects once they have finished injecting millions of tonnes of CO2 underground. The legislation is necessary if the government wants any projects to go ahead for the simple reason that no company will move forward if it’s forever liable for leaks of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere or into underground sources of drinking water. Even if a company was to accept the risk, there’s no guarantee it would still be in business when a problem happens. Remember, we’re talking here about sequestering CO2 underground for eons.
The proposed law would hold private firms liable for any leaks during the sequestration process and for an unspecified lag time after the site was closed — perhaps a decade of two. After ensuring the site was secure, the government — meaning the taxpayers — would assume liability.
Unspecified regulations will deal with details of the lag time and details of how the CCS process will be monitored. The devil is in the yet-to-be written details.
The Alberta government talks grandly about being a world leader in carbon capture and storage, and it assures Albertans the new technology “will” reduce the province’s CO2 emissions by injecting 140 million tonnes underground every year by 2050.
However, there is not a scientist anywhere who knows if the process “will” work at that scale. Currently, four pilot projects in the world sequester a total of about five million tonnes a year, and if Alberta’s test projects go ahead they might sequester another five million, but not until the end of 2015 at the earliest. Alberta will need more than 100 projects if it wants to meet its own target.
CCS is expensive, is untried on a commercial scale and is an energy hog. And it is proving unpopular.
In the past few weeks, two European projects have been scrapped: the Finncap project in Finland due to “technological and financial risks”; and the Shell Barendrecht project in the Netherlands which, according to the Dutch government, ran into a “complete lack of local support” — a polite way of describing the reaction by angry homeowners who, fearing future health risks and depressed property values, staged boisterous demonstrations where they jeered and threatened government politicians. Such protests have coined the acronym NUMBY — Not Under My Backyard.
If projects around the world continue to stall or sputter, Alberta could yet become a leader in CCS simply through the process of elimination. Shell, for example, may have lost its Dutch project, but it has another CCS iron in the fire: the Shell Quest project near Fort Saskatchewan.
The Alberta government certainly seems committed to CCS, but not so much for environmental reasons. It’s less interested in the money-losing process of sequestering CO2 deep underground in ancient salt water aquifers and more interested in the money-making process of pumping captured CO2 into old oilfields to squirt out otherwise unrecoverable oil, perhaps as much as 1.4 billion barrels. “Some estimated $20 billion in royalties may be derived over time by using CCS to extract oil from hard-to-get-at conventional reserves,” Energy Minister Ron Liepert told the assembly this week. The process, called Enhanced Oil Recovery, would, however, negate the goal of reducing absolute emissions of carbon dioxide, because the recovered oil would be refined and burned by cars and trucks, thus creating more emissions.
It’s a bit like using your MasterCard to pay off your Visa, shuffling your debt around without actually reducing anything.
That, arguably, is the ultimate goal of the Alberta government: to use CCS to make more money, not reduce emissions.
Once it figures out how to do that, expect the purse strings to be loosened on the $2-billion CCS fund.
Related posts:
- Canada: Alberta Would Spend C$4 Billion on Carbon Capture and Storage
- Province puts $300M into one last CO2 project Coal-to-gas plan to fuel power plant by 2015
- Coal a natural for carbon capture: Lowry
- Energy companies get federal funds for carbon capture
- Harper government announces funding for eight carbon capture projects