Illusory Optimism at Carbon Capture Canada

For the most part, this year's carbon capture conference had an atmosphere of cautious confidence, but the leader of First Nations affected by a proposed megaproject tells a starkly different story.

Alberta premier Danielle Smith spoke at the Carbon Capture Canada conference in Edmonton on Sept. 10, with remarks that were far less competitive than her speech last year.

The overall mood among industry boosters at this year’s Carbon Capture Canada conference in Edmonton was discernibly distinct from last year’s.

Gone were the Shell logos that appeared on each side of the Edmonton Convention Centre stage to constantly remind attendees whose interests were being served.

This omission served as a potent symbol of the less aggressive messaging at this year’s confab, which made it, frankly, boring. With notable exception, there was a sense pervading the conference that industry is getting its way—something which ought to concern climate advocates.

We’re much closer to the oil and gas industry getting subsidized to invest in largely hypothetical carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) technology, with its promise to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere during fossil fuel production and store it underground.

Perhaps the most important detail to know is that CCUS tech has never existed on the scale necessary to make a significant dent in carbon emissions. Equally unclear is what happens to all that subterranean carbon.

The entire CCUS industry is based on a self-serving illusion that you can have it all—economic growth, a just transition, clean energy, reconciliation—as long as you give these companies public money.

With the passage of Bill C-59 at the conclusion of this year’s spring House of Commons sitting, industry is getting its desired tax credit.

In her opening remarks on Sept. 10, Enhance Energy VP of corporate affairs Candice Paton was optimistic that these tax credits will “spur a lot of activity” in the industry before 2030.

“We're really excited about that, but it's not all rosy,” Paton said, acknowledging anger over the anti-greenwashing provision in the same legislation, which was the topic of a panel discussion later that morning.

CCUS boosters might not like certain aspects of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s agenda, such as constraining their ability to lie about the climate impacts of CCUS or forcing them to decrease emissions through an arcane trading system, but anyone who follows Canadian politics closely enough to be aware of these policies knows Trudeau is likely on his way out.

With a bipartisan consensus in favour of subsidizing CCUS tech, industry knows they’re going to get paid to continue business as usual regardless of who’s in power.

Indigenous communities who are having these projects foisted upon them, and will have to deal with the risks of storing carbon on their traditional lands, know just as well the consequences of proceeding with business as usual.

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The Alberta premier’s keynote address on Tuesday was sharply different in tone from last year’s.

During her address to last year’s conference, Premier Danielle Smith was ready to throw punches, raising the spectre of oil and gas CEOS getting “thrown in jail” if they don’t abide by the federal government’s clean electricity grid mandate by 2035.

“Some of us are not hobbled by all federal policy decisions,” Smith said last year.

Carbon Capture Canada Is Coachella for Greenwashing

Smith’s remarks on Tuesday, by contrast, were much more characteristic of her sunny business luncheon rhetoric. The only dig she took at the feds included a backhanded compliment for their belated embrace of CCUS subsidies.

The feds’ tax credits were legislated one month after Capital Power backed out of a proposed $2.4-billion CCUS investment at its Genesee gas plant, located 71 km southwest of Edmonton.

“It may have been too late to help save the Capital Power deal, but the federal government support—combined with our own, because we passed through our own carbon capture tax credit—will give investors more confidence and certainty as they consider CCUS opportunities in Alberta,” said Smith.

Ian MacGregor, chairman of the board at North West Refining, sounded a rare note of caution about the economic viability of CCUS during a panel that morning.

“I don't think we've got enough money to subsidize our way out of this problem, so we have to think of ways to do it that are economic,” said MacGregor, without suggesting an alternative.

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Beyond prepackaged opening remarks from Environment and Protected Areas Minister Rebecca Schulz, casting the federal government as an enemy of industry was largely confined to a single panel discussion featuring former energy minister Sonya Savage and Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) president and CEO Lisa Baiton.

I covered their panel, in which Savage decried the feds’ effort to clampdown on greenwashing in advertising as “green hushing,” for Canada’s National Observer.

That was a straight piece of news reporting, so here I’ll provide you with some observations and remarks that didn’t make it into the piece.

There was a major exodus of attendees at the outset of the panel, leading moderator Bill Whitelaw of energy industry software firm geoLOGICS to joke that the audience was “suffering from enlarged bladder syndrome,” but the room remained somewhat sparsely attended throughout the discussion.

It’s unclear why so many left the room, but I’d suspect it’s because they’ve heard it all before and recognize the proposed regulations as the act of a lame duck prime minister stubbornly clinging to the delusion that he can win the next election.

It certainly didn’t help that there are few less charismatic people alive than Savage and Baiton.

Those who followed Jason Kenney’s premiership, in which Savage presided over the energy war room and inquiry into foreign funding of environmental activism, will have certainly gotten flashbacks when Savage spoke of a coordinated global effort to ruin the energy industry, despite industry’s efforts to be part of the solution.

“It's part of a longer term process that we've seen,” she said of the anti-greenwashing provisions. “We've seen this playbook unfolding since, probably back to 2008—really since 2015—and the implementation of a lot of policies that are moving towards silencing the energy industry.”

Peak behind the curtain, Savage said, and you have “a lot of activists globally who do not want to see CCUS succeed, and the reason they don't want it to is because it perpetuates and prolongs the use of fossil fuels.”

The final nine words of that sentence perfectly encapsulate why industry supports, and environmentalists oppose, CCUS—it’s a publicly funded pass for oil and gas companies to continue drilling indefinitely.

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Baiton, for her part, was incensed that anyone at the conference would have anything positive to say about Bill C-59, referencing the aforementioned remarks from Candice Paton of Enhance Energy, whose name she had forgotten.

“C-59 is going to be very bad for any decarbonization project,” said Baiton. 

Whitelaw, the moderator, noted that Paton’s point was that “the investment tax credit system was also bundled as a whole bunch of other things,” which he described as “sneaky”—and not that the legislation was an unmitigated good for CCUS. 

Savage, who works as an energy lawyer after opting not to run in last year’s election, was careful not to name names—likely aware of the lawsuit her former boss faces for accusing specific environmental groups of wrongdoing, for which his government’s own inquiry found no evidence.

Not so for Baiton, who cited campaigns by Oil Change International, Sierra Club, STAND.earth and Environmental Defence Canada as incidents of “activist groups targeting carbon capture and [light natural gas] projects, because our industry is part of the energy transition future.”

CAPP, which is calling for Bill C-59 to be scrapped, appealed to the Competition Bureau to at least apply the same criteria to “climate advocacy groups” as it does to oil and gas companies in determining whether their environmental claims hold up to snuff.

One suspects environmental activists will have much less of an issue with being asked to provide evidence for their claims than the fossil fuel industry, which has tied its long-term viability to earning generous government subsidies for hypothetical technology.

But the purpose of CAPP’s gambit isn’t to level the playing field, which is already heavily skewed in industry’s direction. Its true purpose should be understood, like Kenney’s war room and inquiry, as an effort to intimidate environmental activists and waste their time during a climate emergency.

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Two foreign delegates spoke on each day of the conference—California State Sen. Anna M. Caballero on Sept. 10 and Pavel-Casian Nitulescu, the state secretary to the Romanian energy minister, on Sept. 11.

Caballero, who represents the Central Valley in California’s interior, noted that CCUS was integral to her state’s legislated goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2045, in addition to subsidizing electric vehicles, mandating clean electricity and expanding renewable energy production.

According to the California Air Resources Board, she said, the state is banking on at least 20% of its emissions reduction coming from CCUS.

The senator said she first “became really excited and engaged about carbon capture” because of its potential ability to create jobs in her rural, agriculture district.

“As climate change has affected our state, it's tremendously impacted the availability of water. Our snowpack is dwindling and it's clear that in the future we may lose up to a million acres of ag land out of production because we don't have water,” she said.

As an alternative to these lost agriculture jobs, Caballero is awkwardly promoting careers for her constituents in CCUS, conveniently glossing over the fact that increasing amounts of her district’s dwindling water supply will be needed to operate CCUS facilities.

Nitulescu, the Romanian government official, essentially conceded that CCUS is a delay tactic.

“The way we see it, this particular technology not only helps limit carbon emissions into the atmosphere, but also provides a bridge to a slower and more balanced transition to cleaner and more sustainable energy sources in the near future [emphases added],” Nitulescu said.

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At last year’s conference, Chief Kesley Jacko of Cold Lake First Nations criticized the lack of consultation with his people on the Pathways Alliance’s proposed $16.5-billion network of pipelines, which will pump carbon dioxide to a storage hub in Cold Lake, Alta.

“They’re ramming it down our throats,” he said bluntly, adding that his questions were simply not being answered by the alliance, which consists of six of Alberta’s biggest oil and gas companies pushing for CCUS subsidies.

Chief Jacko wasn’t invited back to speak at the conference, but he was in attendance trying to get answers from Pathways. He told the Orchard that nothing has changed since last year, despite the alliance having begun submitting its regulatory paperwork in March.

“It just seems like everything is getting rubber stamped,” Jacko said from the conference’s sidelines on Sept. 11.

Jacko noted that the project lacks an emergency management plan, which he was told would only be ready once the project is open.

“Everybody thinks about the economic side of things, but our environment is suffering,” he said.

Of particular concern is the potential impact the hub might have on his people’s water.

“It's very dear to me, because we still have a beautiful lake and I want my lake to be beautiful for the ones yet to come, for the next seven generations,” said Jacko.

He said he’s struggled with getting answers from Pathways, because every time he approaches them, they hand him off to a different person.

Compounding this frustration is how the consortium has been dealing with the various Treaty First Nations and Métis communities in the megaproject’s vicinity as a single entity, as if their concerns are identical.

“It's a slap in the face when you're talking about historic treaties,” said Jacko.

He said he’s not against hosting a CCUS hub on his people’s traditional territory, but wants to see a “hard reset” on the project so that it’s planned with Indigenous input from the outset.

If that doesn’t happen, Jacko said he’s prepared to take the alliance to court, although he acknowledged it will be a costly and time-consuming process.

So when I speak of a sense of optimism on display at the convention, it’s essential to note who is excluded.

While industry celebrates getting money to invest in unproven CCUS tech, the people who will be most directly impacted if, and when, something goes wrong are treated a hindrance and left almost entirely out of the conversation.

This piece has been updated to accurately reflect the name of Cold Lake First Nations, as well as remarks from Chief Kelsey Jacko.