Rupturing Carbon Capture's Hype-line
Carbon capture and storage is a placebo – but a dangerous one.
This story was originally published in the Watershed Sentinel.
Carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) technology represents the fossil fuel industry’s last stand. Hawking expensive, speculative technology to suck CO2 out of the air and store it underground — rather than transitioning away from fossil fuels — enables immensely profitable oil companies to continue business as usual while presenting themselves as part of the solution to the climate crisis.
“This is not about transitioning away from oil and gas. It’s about transitioning away from emissions … while exporting more oil and delivering more energy,” Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, a long-time fossil fuel booster and one-time CCUS skeptic, said in her 2023 keynote address to the Carbon Capture Canada conference in Edmonton.
Alberta is home to two major CCUS projects, both of which are heavily subsidized by provincial and federal governments. Shell’s Quest project, which secured $865 million in government funding, captures carbon from natural gas used in the creation of so-called “blue hydrogen” to store underground. Enhance Energy and Wolf Midstream’s 240-km Alberta Carbon Trunk Line, which has received $843 in government and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board subsidies, transports captured carbon from a refinery and fertilizer plant to drill for more oil.
These projects, according to a December 2024 study from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, are both over budget and underperforming. The Quest project in particular, which is often touted as one of the world’s most successful CCUS projects, emits more CO2 than it captures.
But the mother of all CCUS projects is a $16.5-billion project proposed by the Pathways Alliance, a consortium of the six largest producers in the tar sands: a 400-km pipeline network that will connect 13 tar sands production facilities with a CCUS storage hub near Cold Lake, Alberta.
Pathways Alliance asked the federal government in early 2023 to subsidize the project’s operations to the tune of 50%, and for an “assurance” that it won’t have to go through an impact assessment. So far, the feds haven’t ordered one. In October 2024, the Alberta Energy Regulator said the project won’t have to go through the provincial environmental assessment process.
In addition to its effort to steamroll regulatory processes, Pathways hasn’t meaningfully sought the approval of Indigenous communities in the project’s vicinity. “They’re ramming it down our throats,” Chief Kelsey Jacko of Cold Lake First Nations said onstage at the 2023 Carbon Capture Canada event.
Jacko wasn’t invited back as a speaker to the next carbon capture conference, but he showed up as an attendee to try and get answers from Pathways executives, which weren’t forthcoming. His priniciple concern is the impact of storing carbon underground on his people’s eponymous water source.
In November, the leaders of Cold Lake First Nations, Beaver Lake Cree Nation, Frog Lake First Nations, Heart Lake First Nation, Kehewin Cree Nation, Onion Lake First Nation and Whitefish (Goodfish) Lake First Nation co-wrote a letter to Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault asking that he proceed with a federal impact assessment.
Chief Jacko’s nephew is Nigel Robinson, the community outreach coordinator with Keepers of the Water, an Indigenous environmental organization founded in 2006 to focus specifically on protecting water. Since October, Robinson has been hosting town halls in Indigenous communities that would be impacted by the Pathways Alliance project in order to raise awareness about the inherent risks of CCUS projects.
Pathways’ proposal, he explained, is for its pipeline to be on private land, “skirting the outside of Cold Lake First Nations, but not going through it.” A pipeline rupture would nonetheless impact the groundwater on reserve, as well as Cold Lake itself “in possibly irreparable ways.”
An additional concern is where Pathways wants to inject the CO2, which it plans to store just one or two kilometres below the ground. The proposed area is so broad that it could include anywhere from the Town of Cold Lake to the southern tip of Elk Point – roughly 100 km away.
The ability of pressurized carbon to spread underground and impact groundwater is “quite high,” said Robinson. “That’s a major issue for not only us at Cold Lake First Nations, but many, many of the different communities along the path of the pipeline.”
Between December 2010 and May 2024, there have been 76 safety incidents related to CO2 pipelines in the US, according to Department of Transportation data compiled by Canada’s National Observer. In a scene that a local police officer likened to a “zombie movie,” a CO2 pipeline rupture in Satartia, Mississippi, population 42, led to the forced evacuation of all its residents as well as 250 others outside of town, many of whom were barely conscious.
CO2 is odourless and invisible, but it’s also an asphyxiant, meaning leaks can go undetected until people have difficulty breathing. According to a 1998 study conducted of the Dakota Gasification Company’s 320-km pipeline that ships CO2 from North Dakota to Saskatchewan, a leak in a 12- to 14-inch diameter pipeline can cause a “kill zone” of 760 feet within a minute.
“It’s definitely a fear that we have in our community,” said Robinson, “in particular, because our ability to take care of fires is not great, so there’s no ability to be prepared to take care of a carbon capture pipeline rupture.”
Keepers of the Water’s engagement sessions consist of a 30-minute slide presentation, in which Robinson explains the basics of CCUS technology and carbon sequestration, its dangers, and what people can do on the ground to challenge the Pathways project. Some jurisdictions, such as Queensland, Australia, have banned CCUS.
“Our plan is to take the comments and concerns of the community, and at the end of our community engagement period, we will host an online panel with a few of the different experts in the field, and hopefully answer some of those questions,” Robinson said, adding that this final panel is tentatively scheduled for May.
“At this time, on the ground, there’s not a ton we can do, but attempting to get our municipal governments to challenge the project is something that we are trying to suggest, or at least bring those issues, those concerns, forward from the community.”
Some attendees of the engagement sessions are broadly supportive of the Pathways project and the economic opportunity it poses. “They will come in with ideas like, ‘Well, carbon’s in the air anyway, why not put it under the earth? It’s natural,’” Robinson said.
He explains to these people that the carbon is liquefied and mixed with various chemicals before underground storage, meaning the process is far from natural. “Once we walk through the fact that this particular pipeline is quite different, and that the pressurized carbon is essentially just chewing away at the pipelines, they mostly don’t want to see this project go through the community,” said Robinson.
Other attendees oppose the project but “feel very disempowered by the electoral and democratic processes,” he added, emphasizing the need to “to build the power of our communities.”
Robinson and Keepers of the Water are up against some powerful forces. The six companies that make up Pathways made more than $8 billion combined profits in the third quarter of 2024 alone – CNRL ($2.1 billion), ConocoPhillips ($2.1 billion), Suncor ($2 billion), Imperial Oil ($1.2 billion), Cenovus ($820 million) and MEG Energy ($167 million).
But Pathways’ opponents have truth on their side. In March 2023, Greenpeace took the alliance to the Competition Bureau, arguing its “Let’s clear the air” ad campaign, which consisted of TV commercials, large newspaper ads, social media posts, a podcast, and at least one billboard, constitutes false advertising. In these ads, the consortium claims its members are “making clear strides toward net zero,” which will “help our country achieve a sustainable future.”
“They can have the best ad campaign they could possibly have, but they can’t escape the fact that it’s bad science and our communities won’t stand for unsafe projects to border our communities and potentially impact our waters and our way of life.”
Greenpeace argued that in order to claim it’s on the path to net zero, Pathways has to ignore all the emissions that come from fossil fuels when they’re burned post-production, assume the widespread adoption of CCUS technology on a scale that doesn’t yet exist, and obscure the role the consortium’s members have played in opposing any concrete climate action that would impact their ability to continue increasing fossil fuel production.
The following year, the federal government announced it would update the Competition Act to place the onus on companies to proactively provide evidence for their claims to be combating climate change or protecting the environment. Pathways responded by scrubbing its entire website, which Keith Brooks of Environmental Defence Canada aptly called “an admission of guilt.”
“They can have the best ad campaign they could possibly have, but they can’t escape the fact that it’s bad science and our communities won’t stand for unsafe projects to border our communities and potentially impact our waters and our way of life,” said Robinson.
Damn it Jeremy. Another important article. Sending you expense money! Keep writing, please.
All the Albertans who claim to love Alberta and support oil and gas, with the thousands of orphan abandoned wells, leaking tarsand ponds, tar seeps from SAGD, polluted ground water and earthquakes from fracking, methane leaks etc. are like the náive children in a abusive marriage where the partners are beating each other mentally and physically, staying poor, letting the home fall apart, sending money abroad, neglecting their children's welfare and education, all the while assuring the kids that this is normal "tough" love and that they really are rich, or would be, if distant relatives had not taken all the money.
The idea of storing vast amounts of CO2 under an F35 nuclear capable bomber base designed to "defend" North America also makes me wonder what kind of hell we, or rather our kids and grandkids, will be defending.