Thank you for inviting me to appear today. I too am no David Schindler, not even a Roger Gibbins. My name is Graham Thomson and I’m a political columnist with the Edmonton Journal, but today I’m speaking to you perhaps more as the author of a research paper on carbon capture and sequestration that I wrote for the University of Toronto. I was given a journalism fellowship from the Canadian Journalism Foundation for the 2008-09 school year, which led to an invitation from the Program on Water Issues at the Munk Centre for International Studies to write a paper. It's called “Burying Carbon Dioxide in Underground Saline Aquifers: Political Folly or Climate Change Fix?”
The paper was presented at the U of T last September at a daylong symposium on carbon capture. I did not focus on Alberta’s oil sands projects because it would appear the oil sands are not a good candidate for carbon capture and sequestration. Here is an excerpt on CCS and the oil sands from my paper, so I'm quoting myself:
A cautionary tale can be found in Alberta’s oil sands that initially looked to CCS as a way to mitigate the industry’s huge carbon footprint. With CCS, Premier Ed Stelmach was proud and optimistic that he had found a way to green the tar sands and improve his province’s battered environmental image. “Alberta believes CCS can help ensure the economy and the environment both thrive in the 21st century. That is the backbone of Alberta's position–a pragmatic approach that will allow us to continue to make a significant contribution to the Canadian economy while at the same time protecting the environment.”
However, oil sands companies have backed away from CCS, realizing the technology will likely not help the industry reduce CO2 pollution because the oil sands have too many diffuse emission sources. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation obtained internal federal briefing notes that explained that CCS is better suited to large, single-point industrial sources of CO2 such as coal-fired plants. To quote, “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 oil sands and they largely relate to upgrader facilities.”
Despite this, the Alberta government insists CCS will somehow help the oil sands in a significant way. The government’s assurance that 140 million tonnes of CO2 will be sequestered each year requires explanation. Even a firm supporter of CCS has his doubts. “I don’t know where they got that 140 number from,” says David Keith from the University of Calgary. “If we have climate change we cannot keep taking oil out of the ground and putting it into the air.”
Thus far, CCS has failed to deliver on its promise to the oil sands, despite the optimism and enthusiasm of politicians and industry leaders. And the Alberta government is learning that CCS projects are more difficult to get off the ground than first thought. Here's an addition. Since my paper was written, the Alberta government has announced letters of intent for four CCS-related projects: The Pioneer project, headed by TransAlta to sequester one million tonnes a year from a coal-fired plant; the Swan Hill Synfuels project to sequester 1.3 million tonnes a year; an Alberta Carbon Trunk Line; and the Quest project, headed by Shell to sequester 1.2 million tonnes a year from the Scotford upgrader. There is no guarantee all these projects will go ahead, and if they do, the target date to start sequestration is 2015.
Looking at the Quest project, the plan is to capture up to 1.2 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year from the upgrader near Edmonton, compress the carbon dioxide into a fluid, transport it by pipeline to a yet-to-be determined site, and inject it more than two kilometres underground into a saline aquifer, a sponge-shaped rock formation filled with salt water.
On paper, the pilot project is an ideal carbon capture and sequestration model. It will be well funded, moderately scaled, carefully selected, closely monitored, and it will inject the carbon dioxide deep underground into a geological formation unmolested by a drill bit. If you're going to isolate carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, this, in theory, is how you're supposed to do it.
However, Shell and its project partners reserve the right to use the captured carbon dioxide for enhanced oil recovery. That means injecting the fluid gas into old oil fields to force out more oil that is then refined and burned, producing more emissions of carbon dioxide. Using CCS to recover more oil arguably makes sense economically, but calling enhanced oil recovery pure “carbon sequestration” in the context of massively reducing global emissions is, environmentally speaking, an exaggeration.
Then there's the issue of trying to store millions of tonnes of highly pressurized carbon dioxide in old oil fields that are punctured by old oil wells. It's called the pincushion effect and it could create leaks of carbon dioxide into groundwater or into the atmosphere. The former could leach elements such as arsenic into the groundwater sources of drinking water. The latter could be a health threat in large enough quantities, but even small amounts over time could undo any climate change good done by sequestration in the first place.
Scientists studying carbon sequestration have high hopes for its safety and effectiveness but cannot, at this point, give us any long-range assurance, especially if we go large scale.
Alberta says it will use carbon sequestration to bury 140 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year by 2050. The federal government wants to bury 600 million tonnes annually by the same year. Worldwide, the plan is to inject billions of tonnes underground each year.
Politicians are making promises for the technology that scientists and the energy companies don't know they can keep.
That's my presentation. Thank you very much.