The Upside of the Underground

Capturing the carbon is actually the easy part. Where to put it, and how to keep it stored a thousand metres below the surface for tens of thousands of years is another matter altogether. Luckily, Canada’s most GHG-plagued province is also blessed with both the engineering expertise and near perfect geology for the subterranean storage of CO₂.

“Right now, I would say that with some engineering you could put a gigatonne of CO₂ in [the Wabamun] study area – and that’s a big deal, because right now, nobody is commercially talking about a gigatonne anywhere,” says Keith, who is trying to figure out how to store a gigatonne (a billion tonnes) of CO₂ in the 5,000-square-kilometre area south of Stony Plain and east of Drayton Valley. “But if we’re going to [capture and store] anything like 10 or 20 megatonnes a year, we need to know we can put a gigatonne in the ground.”

This is all very good news for the energy industry, of course. Electricity generators, the coal lobby and oil and gas companies – and the governments whose economies depend on them – are actively promoting CCS as the pièce de résistance of the fight against climate change. So is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (which recognized Keith’s contribution to its 2007 Nobel Peace Prize), and the Pembina Institute, whose recent Greening the Grid study admits that it can’t meet Alberta’s growing energy demands without retrofitting existing coal-fired power plants with CCS technology.

“Our work has shown that CCS can be a substantial contributor to CO₂ reduction,” says Stephen Kaufman, chair of ICO2N, an alliance of corporations – including major CO₂-emitters like Epcor Utilities, TransAlta Corporation and Syncrude – committed to helping Canada meet its climate-change objectives while supporting economic growth. “The IPCC identified several ways to stabilize atmospheric levels of CO₂, and CCS is one of them. It’s not the only answer, but it will be a significant one, especially in places where coal-fired power plants provide the bulk of our electrical power.”

The bad news is that CCS likely won’t help the oilsands. In the face of increasing international criticism about the negative impact of Alberta’s “dirty” oil, Premier Ed Stelmach and Prime Minister Stephen Harper (whose $1-billion Clean Energy Fund announced in the federal budget in January is expected to mostly benefit CCS projects) routinely tout CCS technology as the key to responsibly developing the gargantuan tar-like deposits of the province’s north. But this is wishful thinking more than rigorous analysis, especially as the more distributed steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) and other enhanced oil recovery methods overtake today’s oilsands mining operations. As one senior oilpatcher who preferred to remain anonymous recently told me, “It seems increasingly like CCS is simply not a cost-effective way to address CO₂ emissions for our SAGD operations.”

No big deal, says Keith, a self-described environmentalist who has just killed another of the environmental community’s sacred cows. “There is no way to clean [the oilsands] in the long run,” says Keith. “There are plenty of things wrong with the oilsands, and they do need to do a better job in many ways. But on a global scale, the oilsands really aren’t very relevant [to climate change]. Given the enormous installed base of coal-fired power plants around the world, developing ways to do retrofits at a reasonable cost is one of the single most important things we can do to solve the global climate problem.”

Not everyone is overjoyed at the prospect of burying billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide beneath our feet. Most environmental groups have lumped carbon capture and storage in with nuclear power as a dangerous, unnecessary and expensive means of addressing our climate problems.

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