Carbon capture storage technology too expensive, takes too long to build: report
Global News
In a report published last August, BMO Capital Markets argued that government can and must do more to get carbon capture projects up and running in this country.
By betting it can solve its emissions problem with carbon capture and storage, Canada’s oil and gas industry risks saddling itself with expensive stranded assets, a new report argues.
The report, released Thursday by the International Institute for Sustainable Development – a Winnipeg-based think-tank that focuses on climate and sustainable resource development – concludes carbon capture and storage technology costs too much and takes too long to build to have any hope of helping industry meet Canada’s 2030 emissions reductions target.
Calling the technology “expensive, energy intensive (and) unproven at scale,” the report urges the federal government not to put any more public money into the oil and gas industry for carbon capture deployment.
“The application of CCS does not align with the time scale or ambition necessary for limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees C,” the report states.
“The opportunity cost of investing in CCS and the risk of stranded assets for Canada’s oil and gas sector will intensify as global climate ambition ratchets up and demand for oil and gas declines.”
Carbon capture and storage is a technology that captures greenhouse gas emissions from industrial sources and stores them deep in the ground to prevent them from being released into the atmosphere.
The technology has existed for decades, but it’s expensive and has been slow to scale up. There are currently just seven CCS projects currently operating in Canada, mostly in the oil and gas sector, and only 30 commercial-scale CCS projects in operation globally.
Still, the oil and gas industry has high hopes for the technology, with a number of new projects in the planning stage in Canada. Most notably, the Pathways Alliance – a consortium of the country’s six largest oilsands companies – has proposed a major carbon capture and storage transportation line that would capture CO2 from oilsands facilities and transport it to a storage facility near Cold Lake, Alta.
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