The Upside of the Underground |
Carbon capture and storage is both urgently needed and vital to the future of Alberta’s energy-driven economy, says star climate scientist David Keith. Too bad Ed Stelmach’s $2-billion plan won’t make it happen
by Jeff Gailus
On a sunny Tuesday evening last June, I strolled into downtown Calgary, the heart of Alberta’s oil and gas industry, to hear David Keith speak about technological fixes to the issue of global warming at what is known around the world as a science café. Organizers bring scientists into public spaces, usually pubs or coffee houses, to talk about their research in an informal atmosphere, one that encourages a greater public understanding of the latest scientific research and, with the help of a cold beer or two, some healthy debate about what to do with it. This struck me as a rather valuable exercise, given the role that science and technology will need to play in keeping Alberta’s economy healthy in an increasingly carbon-constrained world.
I had never met the University of Calgary’s Keith, but I was led to understand that he was one of Canada’s foremost experts on both climate change and carbon capture and storage, perhaps the most promising techno-fix to what he often refers to as “the climate problem.” If the rumours were true, Keith was also an engaging speaker and an intellectual maverick inclined to take on everyone from the oil industry to the environmental community with equal skill and verve.
Clearly, I was not the only one interested in what Keith had to say. By the time I arrived, the back room of the Unicorn pub – appropriately, underground – was packed with more than a hundred chattering science enthusiasts, most of them suit-clad and apparently fresh from their offices in the skyscrapers that towered above us in Calgary’s downtown core.
The evening kicked off with a presentation by Mary Griffiths, a British-born policy adviser with the Pembina Institute. But it was about Keith, not energy or carbon that the quick-spoken Griffiths made her first remarks. “It’s a great honour to be here in the company of David Keith,” she said in a fading British lilt that belied her Old World origins. “I’ve known him for quite a few years and I’m a great fan of his.”
Griffiths spoke eloquently of the Pembina Institute’s position on carbon capture and storage. Unlike most other environmental groups, the Calgary-based think tank supports the use of carbon capture and storage as a necessary if less than ideal solution to the climate problem, at least until we have improved energy efficiency and developed less carbon-intensive alternatives like large-scale wind power.
When she was done, Griffiths sat down to give Keith, the real star of the show, his chance to address the crowd. Bespectacled and lanky, with the long arms of a rock climber, he unfolded gracefully from his chair as he was handed the microphone. After expressing genuine gratitude for being invited to this basement pub-turned-lecture hall, he launched into a sobering summary of the extremely severe risks posed by current levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Comfortable that he had provided the necessary context, he made a shocking pronouncement. Not only is carbon capture and storage the most important short-term solution to the climate change problem, it is the only thing that will save the Alberta economy.
“You could build full-scale carbon capture and storage plants today and I think nobody who’s serious doubts that,” he said with a conviction usually reserved for televangelists and drunkards. “There are uncertainties about how much they would cost, and there are risks entailed with these technologies, as there are with all new technologies. But given the climate risks, and given the economic threats to Alberta if we can’t manage to do this, it’s really important we get some plants built. Not five years from now, but now.”
Then he added the kicker, that Alberta needs one more policy change to make it all happen. A carbon tax. “We need to put a price on carbon,” Keith said matter-of-factly in the question-and-answer period, citing a carbon tax as the most effective method. “This isn’t gonna be done by command and control; it’s going to be done by putting a price on carbon.”
Just two weeks after Keith’s presentation, the Alberta government announced it would invest $2 billion of public money to help kick-start a few small, commercial-scale carbon capture and storage projects in the province, but even this non-trivial financial commitment cannot hope to encourage – or force – the kind of capital investments required to achieve the government’s modest greenhouse gas reductions, never mind the kinds of cuts necessary to seriously address global climate change. Either way, said Keith, it will require a carbon tax.
