Oil sands carbon storage is another $20-billion boondoggle

Former Liberal MP Martha Hall Findlaythinks it’s a bad idea. LORRIE GOLDSTEINTORONTO SUN One of the things preventing Canada from becoming an energy superpower in ... Read more

Former Liberal MP Martha Hall Findlay thinks it’s a bad idea. LORRIE GOLDSTEIN TORONTO SUN One of the things preventing Canada from becoming an energy superpower in an energy-hungry world is that our federal government keeps doing stupid stuff. Justin Trudeau did it for a decade, undermining Canada’s growth by making it economically impossible to build oil pipelines without the government buying them.

Prime Minister Mark Carney is better on this issue than Trudeau, but his government continues to do stupid stuff. The latest is insisting the proposed Alberta to B.C. pipeline be accompanied by “construction and financing of the world’s largest carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) project (Pathways) for the purpose of making Alberta oil among the lowest carbon intensity produced barrels of oil in the world.” This is a looming $20-billion (at least) boondoggle to be 75% financed by federal and Alberta taxpayers.

to go along with an up to $40 billion (so far) pipeline, 90% financed by federal and Alberta taxpayers. Former Liberal MP Martha Hall Findlay — who was an original architect and leading proponent of CCUS as the chief sustainability and climate officer at Suncor Energy — thinks it’s a bad idea. Now director of the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy, she did an about-face on the project she had devoted years to developing in a May 1 column in The Globe and Mail.

She said it would result in federal and Alberta taxpayers along with Canada’s five major oil companies — Canadian Natural, Cenovus Energy, Conoco Phillips Canada, Imperial Oil and Suncor Energy — paying billions of dollars that “will not generate revenue, only significant costs” with a less than 0.02% reduction in global industrial greenhouse gas emissions. In other words it will be another federal fiscal disaster — just like Trudeau’s failed $200-billion-plus climate strategy that Carney scrapped after saying it would fail to meet Trudeau’s emission reduction targets. In adamantly supporting CCUS, Carney is repeating Trudeau’s mistake of mindless virtue-signalling in a country that produces just 1.6% of global emissions, which the parliamentary budget office has said would have no material effect on climate change even if we eliminated all of them tomorrow.

The reasons CCUS is a bad idea — even radical environmental groups oppose it, although that’s because they want to stop all oil sands production — was outlined in a report by Kenneth Greene of the fiscally conservative Fraser Institute this week. CCUS is inefficient when used to store emissions — seldom hitting promised reduction targets and based on experience, subject to significant cost overruns, Indeed, CCUS is mainly used to increase oil and natural gas recovery and thus increase emissions, not lower them. This project requires building more than 650 km of new pipeline and storage infrastructure as large as, or larger than, the infrastructure required for oil and gas production itself, with emissions from 20 facilities in northern Alberta transported to a permanent storage hub up to 2,000 metres underground near Cold Lake, Alta.

This will account for only a fraction of emissions produced by the oil sands, and will inevitably face regulatory and legal challenges, along with political protests about safety concerns. In a rapidly changing world, where energy security is crucial to maintaining national sovereignty and prosperity, we need to stop imposing ruinously expensive restrictions on oil and gas production that our major economic competitors, including the U.S., don’t apply to themselves. Want to save the planet?

Sell our vast natural gas resources globally to replace coal-fired electricity, the single most effective thing we could do to lower global emissions.