New Technology

Canada is a world leader in carbon capture and storage. CCS can help Canada balance its need for energy with its need to protect the environment. However, this new technology is still in the testing stage, and Canada needs to start reducing its emissions now to meet future targets.

The biggest contributors to the country’s industrial carbon dioxide emissions are from coal-fired power generation plants and other industry sectors such as chemical manufacturing and the fossil fuel sector, including natural gas production and processing; oilsands mining, extraction and upgrading; and petroleum refining.

According to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, the oilsands’ sector contributes about 5 per cent of Canada’s total greenhouse gas emissions, and the sector accounts only for approximately 0.1 per cent of global GHG emissions.

Based on CAPP’s Canadian Crude Oil Production Forecast 2009 – 2025, dated June 2009, Canada’s oilsands’ production is expected to increase from 1.4 million barrels per day in 2009 to 2.2 million barrels per day in 2015 and almost to 3 million barrels per day by 2020. This increase in production means an increase in CO2 emissions.

By 2020, the Government of Canada is committed to reducing Canada’s total GHGs by 17% from its 2005 levels. In 2005, CO2 emissions levels were 747 megatonnes, and a 17 % from those levels would see a decrease of about 124 megatonnes of CO2 emissions.

CCS has been tested in Canada for the past few decades. One example of a highly successful CCS research project, with Enhanced Oil Recovery, is the International Energy Agency’s Greenhouse Gas Weyburn-Midale CO2 Monitoring and Storage Project located near Weyburn, Saskatchewan.

Launched in 2000, this project studies CO2 injection and storage in depleted oilfields in South Eastern Saskatchewan. It is operated in conjunction with two commercial CO2 floods, where huge volumes of the gas (2.8 million megatonnes per year) are injected to enhance oil production. Since the start-up of the CO2 flood, more than 14.8 megatonnes of CO2 have been safely stored.

The Government of Canada is investing in CCS to ensure that its potential is maximized. In the Economic Action Plan for Canada of 2009, the Government of Canada introduced the Clean Energy Fund which will make substantial investments in large-scale carbon capture and storage projects.

In November 2009, the Government of Canada provided $63.3 million in funding from its Clean Energy Fund and its ecoENERGY Technology Initiative to Enhance Energy Inc. to construct the province of Alberta’s first government-funded, commercially-viable CCS backbone pipeline, the Alberta Carbon Trunk Line. The Government of Alberta also provided $495 million in funding from its $2 billion Carbon Capture and Storage Fund to Enhance Energy to construct the ACTL.

Federal funding has also been committed for the following projects, which are being co-funded with the province of Alberta:

• $120 million to Shell Quest which will capture CO2 from an existing oilsands upgrader for permanent storage in a saline aquifer
• $343 million to TransAlta Project Pioneer for construction of a new power plant equipped with post-combustion capture of around 1 megatonnes of CO2

Environment Canada says the Canada-Alberta ecoENERGY Carbon Capture and Storage Task Force has estimated that Canada has the potential to store as much as 600 million tonnes of CO2 per year, roughly equal to 75 per cent of Canada’s current annual emissions of GHGs.

The Governments of Canada, Alberta and the industry are working together to deploy CCS. However, there is much more work to be done, and there are many unknown external factors that will have mitigating effects on how and when CCS will be fully deployed.