You mean Carbon Capture and Sequestration isn't a silver bullet for the oilsands??? Whaaaat?

Good news everybody! Carbon Capture and Sequestration technology actually won't help capture much emissions from gianourmous oilsands operations. What's more, the Alberta government has known about this for a while, but the Premier still pushes CCS as the be-all-end-all solution for making the oilsands 'sustainable' and encouraging foreign investment.

Allow me to quote the CBC at length:

"Only a small percentage of emitted CO2 is 'capturable' since most emissions aren't pure enough," the notes say. "Only limited near-term opportunities exist in the oilsands and they largely relate to upgrader facilities."

The Canadian and Alberta governments are spending about $2.5 billion on developing carbon capture and storage, and the oilsands generally come up as the first reason for spending the money.

In March, when he repeated a $240-million federal commitment to a project in Saskatchewan, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said: "This new technology, carbon capture and storage, when fully commercialized ... will collect carbon dioxide emissions from oilsands operations and coal-fired electrical plants and seal them deep underground."

The briefing notes, which went to federal and provincial politicians, were produced months before Harper's announcement. The carbon capture task force issued a public version of its final report in January.

David Keith, a professor of petroleum and chemical engineering at the University of Calgary, was the lead scientist on the task force.

He says he's frustrated that politicians and the industry keep focusing on the oilsands when there are sources of greenhouse gases to capture more easily and at less cost, including coal-fired power plants.

Rational people shouldn't focus on reducing emissions in the oilsands through carbon capture and storage, Keith says.

Hmmm, sounds like petroleum engineer David Keith and the CBC are in cahoots with the environmental lobby to push their anti-Alberta agenda. Doesn't it, Ed?

Comments

[rc]

"He says he's frustrated that politicians and the industry keep focusing on the oilsands when there are sources of greenhouse gases to capture more easily and at less cost, including coal-fired power plants.

Rational people shouldn't focus on reducing emissions in the oilsands through carbon capture and storage, Keith says."

This surprises someone? Of course these PC and federal Tory politicians want to look like they're doing "something" to make the Athabasca projects somehow less environmentally distasteful; They're increasingly becoming an albatross around our Alberta's neck -- and Canada, by extension.

Can't blame them for grasping at straws like CCS, though. They have to; I guess their first idea was to put on an expensive greenwashing PR campaign, to try and hide the elephant in the room. Guess that didn't work out so well....

[David Lewis]

The quote from Professor Keith in this CBC report makes sense if your goal was to get the most reductions in CO2 emissions with the money Alberta and Canada have allocated for carbon capture research and development.

But that isn't what Canada and Alberta are trying to do. This carbon capture research is driven by market prospects for tar sand oil in the US. Given that the tar sand oil is a major driver of the entire Canadian economy, it seems rational to see if it harmful effects could be reduced or eliminated by doing further research.

At $100 a barrel, which oil may return to sooner than most want to see, there are $17 trillion dollars of oil in the sand. The US may decide one day that it won't buy the oil unless the emissions of the energy used to process it are controlled or offset.

One area of Professor Keith's own research is to develop a process to extract the carbon dioxide from ordinary air which he is doing on a pilot scale at his university. He's removing it from ordinary air for 100 kwhr electricity per tonne, i.e. $7 retail cost if he bought the electricity where I live in BC. One way to look at this work is it will eventually establish an upper limit to how expensive it could possibly be to remove CO2 from exhaust streams. Also it is important as climate change studies indicate civilization will need every tool it can get to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions and restore the atmosphere to safer levels of these gases. Keith's concept is if CO2 can be allowed into the atmosphere in one place, say a jet fuel powered airplane, and removed in another, like his backyard, fossil fuels could be part of the future energy mix.

So don't take the quote in the post above as indicating Keith thinks carbon capture is "greenwash" bogus technology.

One figure I've seen for how much CO2 is emitted as tar sand oil is produced in excess of the energy used in processing conventional, on average, per barrel, is around 130 lbs of CO2. IPCC estimates on pilot studies indicate $20-$45 per tonne CO2 removed and stored underground, which would be $3 per barrel. A recent Rand study put a figure of $7 (I think), per barrel.

The origin of this CBC report is Edmonton CBC, a reporter named Erik Denison, who did a series on the oil sands, Black Gold or Black Eye.

I don't understand why people want to reject carbon capture technology as bogus. The I.P.C.C. has assessed and sythesized the literature and stated it will be a part of future energy systems civilization will have to use if it wants to limit climate change.

China and India are basing their continued development on coal fired power, and one area we could help them reduce their emissions would be if we developed carbon capture and storage technology. Germany is leading the world in implementing its targets for reducing CO2 emissions, and they are still going to build 26 new coal fired electricity generating plants as baseload power for their grid.

The fact that the worldwide coal industry has touted this technology for years and not built one full scale plant says something about the coal industry, I think, rather than the technology. James Hansen, said by the President of the National Academy of Sciences in the US to be the best climatologist in the world, says he expects to testify at the trials of some of the CEOs of the big Coal companies one day. But he consistently says no more coal plants without carbon capture and storage. But people seem to think that anything touted by Big Coal, or in this case, by long standing climate change deniers like the governments of Canada and Alberta must be bogus.

Read the IPCC Special Report on Carbon Capture and Storage, the M.I.T. "Future of Coal" study, and Mark Jaccard's "Sustainable Fossil Fuels".

Alberta and Canada are putting some money into carbon capture because they can see the US is starting to take CO2 emissions more seriously. Useful criticism of this move might be to say accelerate the development, and/or make the industry pay more. Or have the government stay out of it on the details, and just implement a high enough price on carbon instead, which would drive the industry to do whatever it could to eliminate the emissions or go out of business.