Alberta has been capturing carbon for three decades. Yet, ask anyone who spends their days contemplating carbon capture and storage (CCS) about its future in the province and you’re likely to get similar responses from each: a small sigh, followed by descriptors like “disappointing” and “not good.” It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
The sighing is no doubt related to the high ambitions for CCS under the Alberta government’s climate change plan of 2008.
[Website editor's note: This article is a useful summary of provincial emission-reduction policies, or rather the lack thereof.]
Provincial premiers boast leadership in the country’s effort to cut greenhouse gas emissions, but achieving their own lofty ambitions will require political courage and aggressive policies to drive fundamental changes in the way Canadians produce and consume energy.
Ontario Power Generation will unveil plans Monday for a $12.8-billion refurbishment of four nuclear reactors at the Darlington generating station east of Toronto.
The Canadian Press has learned the provincial Liberal cabinet has given approval to start the rebuild of the first reactor this fall, and OPG will have to come back to the government for approval of each subsequent reactor refurbishment project.
On the surface, the Sturgeon refinery project has just about everything Albertans would hope for as their economy sputters.
It will create jobs by processing scads of gooey crude from the oil sands into diesel fuel. It has long-term bitumen supply agreements with the province and one of Canada's largest oil companies.
Its carbon emissions will be piped away for use in old oil reservoirs to help produce leftover crude rather than vented into the atmosphere. That fits well with the province's new climate framework.
~~Legal observers say that while TransCanada Corp. appears to have a strong case under the North American free-trade agreement to challenge Washington’s rejection of its Keystone XL pipeline, the Calgary-based company has just embarked on a long-haul process in which it remains an underdog.
Greenpeace undercover investigation has exposed how fossil fuel companies can secretly pay academics at leading American universities to write research that sows doubt about climate science and promotes the companies’ commercial interests.
Posing as representatives of oil and coal companies, reporters from Greenpeace UK asked academics from Princeton and Penn State to write papers promoting the benefits of CO2 and the use of coal in developing countries.
The professors agreed to write the reports and said they did not need to disclose the source of the funding.
It was quite a sight: The CEOs of Alberta’s oilsands projects stood with NDP Premier Rachel Notley to announce Alberta’s climate plan before the climate talks in Paris. The CEOs had the widest smiles.
No wonder. Alberta’s climate plan targets the 28 per cent of Alberta’s greenhouse gases from power generation and transportation (driving), and leaves the 46 per cent of the province’s emissions from the production of oil and gas almost scot-free.
A hard cap on oilsands emissions that became part of Alberta Premier Rachel Notley’s climate change plan was the product of secret negotiations between four top oilsands companies and four environmental organizations, the Financial Post has learned.
The companies agreed to the cap in exchange for the environmental groups backing down on opposition to oil export pipelines, but the deal left other players on the sidelines, and that has created a deep division in Canada’s oil and gas sector.
