Alberta reaction mixed to questions about carbon capture technology

Last Updated: Tuesday, November 25, 2008 | 10:25 AM MT

CBC News

Secret advice to politicians: oilsands emissions hard to scrub

Briefing document is pessimistic on carbon storage and capture

Last Updated: Monday, November 24, 2008 | 9:49 AM MT Comments400Recommended258

CBC News

Carbon dioxide emissions from Western Canada’s oilsands are set to increase from five per cent to 16 per cent of the national total by 2020 under current plans. (Canadian Press)CBC News has obtained a government document that says reducing greenhouse gases from Western Canada’s oilsands will be much more difficult than some politicians and the industry suggest.

The ministerial briefing notes, initially marked “Secret,” say that just a small percentage of the carbon dioxide released in mining the sands and producing fuel from them can be captured.

The oilsands are the fastest-growing source of CO2 in the country, set to increase from five per cent to 16 per cent of total emissions by 2020 under current plans.

Capturing the gas and pumping it underground has been the key public strategy for reducing the oilsands industry’s contribution to global warming.

The briefing notes, obtained by CBC News under freedom-of-information legislation, are based on the findings of a joint Canada and Alberta task force on carbon capture and storage.

Not concentrated enough

Little of the oilsands’ carbon dioxide can be captured because most emissions aren’t concentrated enough, the notes say. For efficient capture, there must be a high concentration of CO2 coming out of a smoke stack.

“Only a small percentage of emitted CO2 is ‘capturable’ since most emissions aren’t pure enough,” the notes say. “Only limited near-term opportunities exist in the oilsands and they largely relate to upgrader facilities.”

The Canadian and Alberta governments are spending about $2.5 billion on developing carbon capture and storage, and the oilsands generally come up as the first reason for spending the money.

In March, when he repeated a $240-million federal commitment to a project in Saskatchewan, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said: “This new technology, carbon capture and storage, when fully commercialized … will collect carbon dioxide emissions from oilsands operations and coal-fired electrical plants and seal them deep underground.”

The briefing notes, which went to federal and provincial politicians, were produced months before Harper’s announcement. The carbon capture task force issued a public version of its final report in January.

David Keith, a professor of petroleum and chemical engineering at the University of Calgary, was the lead scientist on the task force.

He says he’s frustrated that politicians and the industry keep focusing on the oilsands when there are sources of greenhouse gases to capture more easily and at less cost, including coal-fired power plants.

Rational people shouldn’t focus on reducing emissions in the oilsands through carbon capture and storage, Keith says.

“The actual content of the briefing note is a pretty fair summary of the technical situation we have,” he told CBC News.

Several events in coming months will put the debate over oilsands development front and centre, says Dan Woynillowicz of the Pembina Institute.

Pembina has done the heavy lifting for years on oilsand environmental issues, producing an array of scientific reports on issues such as water supply, tailings ponds and destruction of wildlife habitat.

The Pembina isn’t prone to heated rhetoric, but, like the Council of Canadians, it wants no new approvals for oilsands projects until the current environmental issues are dealt with, from GHGemissions to low water flow in the Athbasca River.

Pembina, along with several other environmental groups, next March will call for a delay when French oil giant Total seeks approval for its open pit mine from Alberta’s Energy Resources Conservation Board.

Before that, in December, the Canadian government will go to Poznan, Poland for a Climate Change Conference to plan for the next step after the Kyoto protocol.

Meanwhile, says Woynillowicz, watch out for increasing tensions within Canada over the impact of the massive oilsands development in other provinces.

He noted that CIBC chief economist Jeff Rubin last week pointed to higher energy costs as a significant factor in the global downturn, not just falling house prices.

“So we may see some sentiment that the uncontrolled development in Alberta is hurting the Ontario economy,” says Woynillowicz.

Meanwhile, the economic slowdown provides the perfect opportunity for Alberta to come up with some new regulations to address the environmental issues, he says.

But Dave Taras, a communications professor at the University of Calgary, says don’t hold your breath. In downtown Calgary, the sudden economic slowdown is pushing environmental concerns right off the table.

“A lot of people won’t be sympathetic to in-yourface moral anger. That could change, but it’s not a good time for protests,” he says.

Besides, unless the environmental campaign translates into anti-government votes at the ballot box, it has little traction in Alberta. There was definitely no sign in the last election, which delivered another Conservative landslide, that voters had any time for the call for slower oilsands development.

“The real climate change is when you enter Alberta,” he quipped.

Taras is also skeptical an anti-oilsands campaign will succeed in Europe.

“Europe is eager to unhook themselves from Russian supplies, so I’m not sure the business elites will be moved.”

But this growing debate over the “black gold rush” in the oilsands is much broader than an environmental issue, says Calgary author Andrew Nikiforuk, who just released his new book Tarsands — Dirty Oil and The Future of a Continent.

“This is a political story, about the development of the country,” says Nikiforuk, who calls the tarsands the world’s largest energy project. In Canada, it impacts every province, he says

“This is Alberta’s revenge for the National Energy Program. We’ve managed to tank the Ontario manufacturing sector and brought the country further into the U.S. trading orbit.

“When Ontario becomes a have-not province, the rapid development of the tarsands had something to do with it.”

Alberta and Canada are also taking a drubbing from some prestigious economic agencies, including the Conference Board of Canada, the International Monetary Fund and the OECDfor their handling of the oilsands and the vast royalties, said Nikiforuk.

“We need a national debate about how to slowdown the oilsands, how to get better regulations and bring in conservation and renewable energy,” says Nikiforuk.

“We need a conservative agenda, not the libertarian one that just tanked the global financial markets,” he says.

“Otherwise, Peter Lougheed’s prediction will come true. The U.S. will put pressure on Canada to clean up the oilsands and there will be a constitutional battle.”

Over at the Sierra Club offices in Edmonton, Lindsay Telfer says the environment movement won’t make the same mistake it did during the antiseal hunt campaign years ago when it didn’t address the livelihood of the hunters.

This time, the emphasis is on building a new energy economy with lots of jobs in green technology.

“It’s not just about slowing down the tarsands, but also building an economy based on alternative energy,” says Telfer.

But that message tends to get lost in the media, which play up the conflict, she adds.

“Alberta has gone through so many boom and bust cycles, I just want to see some leadership that will break that cycle.

“We need a pace of development that will make the resource last for 90 years and that starts with slowing down the rate of approvals.”

“The protests are getting stronger because we’re not seeing any change,” she says.

“Until we get a sense of something happening, the protests will continue.”

U.S. Congress upholds restrictions on high-carbon fuels

Last Updated: Thursday, September 25, 2008 | 10:18 PM ET

CBC News

Mining trucks carry loads of oil-laden sand after being loaded by huge shovels at the Albian Sands oilsands project in Fort McMurray, Alta., in 2005. (Jeff McIntosh/Associated Press)Fuels derived from Alberta’s tarsands could find a tougher market in the United States after Congress decided Thursday to uphold legislation restricting imports of fuels from high-carbon sources.

The decision was celebrated by environmental organizations that have been campaigning against changes to Section 526 of the U.S. Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007.

Members of Congress have spent the past nine months contemplating whether to repeal or weaken Section 526, which deals with fuels from high-carbon sources such as tarsands oil, liquid coal and oil shale.

“Of course, we will remain vigilant against new attacks on Section 526, but this decision in the Defence Authorization Bill debate should carry great weight,” said Liz Barratt-Brown, a senior lawyer with the Natural Resources Defence Council, in a statement.

“The bottom line is Americans want their government to invest in new clean energy, not high-carbon fuels of the past.”

Under Section 526 of the act, U.S. federal government agencies are restricted from entering into contracts to purchase synthetic, alternative or non-conventional fuels with higher emissions than their conventional counterparts, unless the life cycle of their greenhouse gas emissions are the same as or less than conventional oil.

The provision has been described by its author, Representative Henry A. Waxman, as a way to ensure U.S. federal agencies are not spending taxpayer dollars on new fuel sources that will exacerbate global warming.

“The provision is also applicable to fuels derived from tarsands, which produce significantly higher greenhouse gas emissions than are produced by comparable fuel from conventional petroleum sources,” Waxman wrote in a March letter to the chairman of the U.S. Senate committee on energy and natural resources.

“The development and expanded use of these fuels could significantly exacerbate global warming, with highly dangerous effects. Thus, it is important to ensure that the federal government does not subsidize or otherwise support the expanded use of these fuels through government purchasing decisions.”

Some U.S. officials have said the regulations will not apply to oilsands production.

Greg Stringham, spokesman for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, said it will be up to Congress to decide whether this law will apply to gas from the oilsands.

“The language is very unclear because they’ve used the words alternative fuel. So what we need is to have a clear definition on the law before it can be implemented.”

Stelmach vows to seek larger Alberta crude market

Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach has urged U.S. business leaders not to believe that oilsands production takes too much of a toll on the environment. He travelled in January to Washington, where he told an energy forum that attempts to slow oilsands development don’t make sense.

Stelmach has vowed to seek a larger market for Alberta crude, whether or not the U.S. government placed restrictions on the province’s oil.

“We will not only depend on the American market, we will expand markets,” Stelmach said in May in Edmonton. “And if that means building a pipeline to the coast and selling oil to another country, we will.”

Environmentalists have targeted Alberta’s oilsands industry because they say the process of refining bitumen creates three times as much greenhouse gas as conventional oil production methods.

Most of the oil in the tarsands is trapped in a mixture of sand, water and clay, making it difficult and expensive to extract.

A conference of U.S. mayors in July approved a resolution calling on its members to ban the use of energy from unconventional sources such as the tarsands because of the impact on the environment.

The mayors said importing oilsands fuel slows the transition in the United States to cleaner energy sources.

The protesters attempted to block a waste pipe and unveiled a large banner along the bank of the two-kilometre-wide toxic lake that read “World’s Dirtiest Oil: Stop the Tar Sands.” It was but another salvo in the public relations war over the world’s largest energy development. One side calls the bitumen boom “dirty oil” while miners and governments call the multi-billion-dollar project a sustainable “anchor of prosperity.” (For the record, the oilsands mining industry now generates 1.8 billion litres of toxic waste a day; nearly all of the lakes of impounded waste leak; and no, the whole mess, as Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority recently ruled, is not sustainable.)

The RCMP dutifully detained and fined the Greenpeace trespassers and left it at that. At the time, spokesmen for Syncrude, the largest oilsands developer and supplier of 13% of Canada’s oil, wisely expressed thanks that “no one was hurt.” The settling basin, after all, is a sprawling industrial site crawling with monster vehicles. But the company, which has a reputation for legally bullying its critics (including an 85-year-old U.S. grandmother and Colorado resident who was forced to remove photographs of Syncrude’s facilities from her too informative website), never said anything about financial pain. On Aug. 21, the mega oil miner, 25% of which is owned by the mighty Imperial Oil, sued the duck loving activists for $120,000 in damages. Furthermore, the company argued in its plucky statement of claim that the tailings B&E job actually put Syncrude “at risk of further physical damage to its property…and quiet enjoyment of the Operation Lands.” The company is also seeking a permanent injunction against the activists (including one Norwegian citizen) to prevent them from performing such hijinks again. Or highlighting the porous nature of security in the oilsands, for that matter. “The real driver here is safety,” says Syncrude spokesman Alain Moore. “They could put themselves at risk. We know there is a lot of debate about the oilsands and we support that.”

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Dirty Business
The Tar Sands of Alberta and Toxic Waste

By Andrew Nikiforuk; September, 21 2008 – Znet
http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/18878

Fred McDonald, a Métis trapper and storyteller extraordinaire, often questioned the reasoning and science behind the proliferation of toxic ponds and end-pit lakes. Before he died in 2007 of kidney failure, McDonald lived in Fort McKay, an Aboriginal community 72 kilometres north of Fort Saskatchewan. The stench of hydrocarbons from the surrounding mines often hangs heavily in the air there, and in 2006, an ammonia release from a Syncrude facility hospitalized more than 20 children.

On a fall day in 2006, McDonald sat in his kitchen, sipping a glass of rat root juice (“It’s good for everything,” he told me) and breathing through an oxygen tube. The day before, he had spent several hours on a dialysis machine. McDonald’s kidneys were failing but not his mind. He recalled the days when Tar Island was a good place to fish and hunt. (Tar Island was so named by local Cree and Métis after the bitumen that often oozed down its banks. In the late 1960s, Suncor transformed the island into a tailings pond, the first in the tar sands.) “It always had moose on it. We loved that island. We are slowly losing everything.”

McDonald was born on the river, and he had trapped, fished, farmed and worked for the oil companies. He fondly remembered the 1930 and 1940s, when Syrian fur traders exchanged pots and pans for muskrat and beaver furs along the Athabasca River. Families lived off the land then and had feasts of rabbit. They netted jackfish, pickerel and whitefish all winter long. “Everyone walked or paddled, and the people were healthy,” McDonald said. “No one travels that river anymore. There is nothing in that river. It’s polluted. Once you could dip your cup and have a nice cold drink from that river, and now you can’t.”

McDonald said that tar-sands pollution is killing berries. The mines are also draining the surrounding muskeg of water: “It’s our future source of water, and it’s drying.” Climate warming has changed the clear blue ice of the Athabasca River in the winter to a dangerous slush. McDonald had recently told his son not to have any more children: “They are going to suffer. They are going to have a tough time to breathe and will have nothing to drink.” He dismissed the talk of reclaiming waste ponds and open-pit mines as a white-skinned fairy tale. “There is no way in this world that you can put Mother Earth back like it was.”

Because of “the bad behaviour of clays,” Natural Resources Canada researcher Randy Mikula suspects that tar-sands waste won’t settle to solid form for 1,000 years, so “something has to be done.” Right now the best solution might be a “brute force” centrifugal approach, says Mikula. Waste is spun (much like lettuce in a spinner) in order to create material that is dry and stackable, while recovering water at the same time. Both Syncrude and Suncor have started pilot projects. “We could reduce water usage by a barrel, which means less water withdrawn from the Athabasca River,” Mikula says.

The volume of sand and toxic waste produced by the tar sands to date is as great as the agricultural drainage and sewage water the water-short nation of Egypt, with a population of 80 million, reuses every year. By 2015, the tar sands could be creating ponds of wastewater three times that size.

The growing waste problem is nowhere more evident than downstream in Fort Chipewyan, where the Athabasca and Peace rivers spill into Lake Athabasca. About 10 years ago, Raymond Ladouceur, a 65-year-old commercial Métis fishermen, started to find something new in his pickerel nets: damned ugly fish. The deformities included crooked tails, humpbacks, bulging eyes and skin tumours. “Jesus, I was pulling them out all the time,” says Ladouceur. “But we threw the deformed fish away. They weren’t fit for human consumption.”

In 2002, Ladouceur and other fishermen packed up 90 kilos of the deformed fish and flew them off to Fort McMurray for study by Alberta Environment. Nobody from the government department picked up the fish over the weekend, though, and they rotted.

Like most residents of Fort Chipewyan, Ladouceur believes there is something definitely wrong with the water. He has a list of suspects. Abandoned uranium mines on the east end of the lake, for example, have been leaking for years. “God knows how much radium is in this lake,” he says. Then there are the pulp mills and, of course, the tar sands and tar ponds. Ladouceur says his cousin collected yellow scum from the river downstream from the mines and dried it, and “it caught on fire.” Almost everyone in Fort Chip has witnessed oil spills or leaks on the Athabasca River.

The governments of Alberta and Canada, along with the multinational companies, insist not only that they’ll clean up the whole mess but that rapid tar-sands development is sustainable. “Alberta is proving that environmental protection and economic development can happen at the same time,” promises a 2008 provincial propaganda sheet entitled “Opportunity and Balance.” The Canadian Parliament, an institution less inclined to hubris, talks about groping “towards sustainable development” in its 2007 tar sands report.

Alberta’s bitumen apologists swear that “work is progressing to return the disturbed land to a natural state after development, and it will be done right.” The province’s former ambassador to the United States, Murray Smith, even assured our number-one oil market that the industry will achieve “100 percent long-term restoration of the lands it makes use of.” Why, major tar-sand companies have even planted 7.5 million tree seedlings. The Mining Association of Canada says reclaiming open-pit mines can be done with a “vision worthy of a Group of Seven artist.”

According to the Alberta government, open-pit mines will eventually obliterate 3,500 square kilometres of forest. The government likes to minimize the scale of the destruction by saying that it’s “less than one percent of boreal forest area” in Canada. (In other words, it’s perfectly okay to destroy small places.) Whatever the Orwellian rhetoric, the forest-top removal will cover an area four times larger than that of New York City. Outdoor enthusiasts can imagine half of Banff National Park flattened and excavated.

Even at that, the mines make up only a small part of the wreckage created by the megaproject. The Alberta government has leased an additional 50,000 square kilometres of land (and another 100,000 square kilometres await global investors) for in-situ projects including steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD). Canada’s four famed mountain parks – Jasper, Banff, Yoho, and Kootenay – could easily fit into this industrial zone with approximately 20,000 square kilometres left over. SAGD development will slice and dice the land with thousands of industrial well sites, seismic lines, pipelines and roads. This fragmentation will transform the forest into a bitumen park, exterminating the population of woodland caribou and decimating song-birds home from their winter in the tropics. Seismic lines, which make a forest look like an engineered spider web, typically nee! d more than 100 years to fill in with trees again. Yet the government has no tight guidelines for reclaiming forest ruined by SAGD.

Government definitions of reclamation exhibit a genuine vagueness as well as a preference for mechanics over biology. According to Alberta’s Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act, reclamation is mostly about “stabilization, contouring, maintenance, conditioning or reconstruction of the surface of the land.” Operators of the open-pit mines must “conserve and reclaim disturbed land to an equivalent land capability.” Doing so will earn them a certificate proving the deed done. Industry-friendly scientists talk about creating “a self-sustaining ecosystem with no long-term toxicity.” Those reassured by such academic language might want to consider the actual pace of reclamation: after nearly 50 years of mining, the provincial government has certified only 104 hectares of forest, or 0.2 percent of the land dug up since 1963. Even industry admits that reclamation has moved more slowly than cold bitumen in a pipeline! .

The uncomfortable truth remains simply this: the rapid mining of the boreal forest has outpaced the science on the reclamation of wetlands, soil, and forest uplands by decades. No one has a handle on the real costs of reclamation. Security deposits remain laughably inadequate. And both Alberta and Canada have an appalling record of environmental negligence and disregard for taxpayers.

Reclamation in the tar sands now amounts to little more than putting lipstick on a corpse. Unless Alberta and Canada soon address the pace, effectiveness and transparency of reclamation, a rich forest will become an impoverished industrial park littered with salts, grass, polluted water and spindly trees. It might, with a bit of luck and some regular rainfall, eventually resemble a third-rate golf course in the Sudan.

Excerpted from Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent, to be published October 15 by Greystone Books/Douglas & McIntyre.

The CPDFN say they weren’t consulted when the government leased away “the heart” of their traditional territory to MEG Energy Corporation for an oilsands (tarsands) project.

Focusing primarily on their Treaty Rights, CPDFN hope the lawsuit will require Alberta to hold ‘meaningful consultations’ so as to protect one of the few remaining places in their Traditional Territory where they can exercise their rights.

See below for a press release from the Chipewyan Dene Prairie First Nation.

First Nation Files Lawsuit Challenging Oilsands Tenure and Regulatory Approval System

EDMONTON, ALBERTA–(June 4, 2008) – Today the Chipewyan Prairie Dene First Nation (”CPDFN”) filed legal action in the Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench against the Alberta Government alleging a breach of Alberta’s constitutional duty to consult with the First Nation on MEG Energy Corp.’s Christina Lake Regional Project, Phase 3. This Project is planned to be located in the heart of CPDFN’s Traditional Territory, between Christina Lake and Winifred Lake, the breadbasket of the First Nation.

“Our lakes, our land and the animals and fish we have relied on for thousands of years to support our way of life and cultural values are being destroyed by out-of-control oilsands developments,” said Chief Vern Janvier of CPDFN. “Because our constitutionally-protected rights are at risk in one of the few remaining places in our Traditional Territory where we can exercise them, we’ve asked the Courts to step in before it’s too late.”

The Judicial Review Application filed by CPDFN today seeks a ruling that will require Alberta to hold meaningful consultation with CPDFN about the granting of oil sands leases in CPDFN’s Traditional Territory. This has implications for all First Nations and all resource developers in the oilsands and across Alberta.

The First Nation is also asking the Court to rule that the Alberta Energy Resources Conservation Board and Alberta Environment cannot not approve MEG Energy’s Phase 3 oil sands project until Alberta meaningfully consults with CPDFN so as to ensure protection of CPDFN’s Treaty and Aboriginal rights. The case also raises the need, through consultation with CPDFN, for regional land-use planning, proper cumulative impacts assessment that looks at the full impact of existing, planned and reasonably foreseeable development, and for the establishment of appropriate baseline data, benchmarks and related measures to guide development and to ensure that CPDFN can exercise its rights now and in the future.

“MEG Energy has been given leases around Christina Lake and Winifred Lake, very special places to our people who have hunted, fished and carried out our cultural practices there for generations,” said Chief Janvier. The Chief went on to state, “For years, we have told Alberta and industry of our concerns about the erosion of our rights through ever-increasing development and the lack of proper planning for resource development. Yet Alberta has done almost nothing to change the way they regulate this development. If anything, Alberta has sped up the pace of its approvals.”

Alberta policy delegates legal responsibility for consultation with First Nations to oil and gas companies who have a clear conflict of interest in playing such a role. Not only does consultation take place after leases have already been awarded so that development is already mostly locked-in, but companies also have no control over the cumulative effects with other projects that infringe upon Treaty and Aboriginal rights. Therefore, only governments can conduct meaningful consultation, and only when done early.

“The whole oil sands consultation and management framework is inconsistent with the law of the Land, as decided by the Supreme Court of Canada and needs to be fixed,” said Chief Janvier. “This needs to happen before our people and other First Nations have our way of life and culture taken away forever.”

For more information, please contact

Chipewyan Prairie Dene First Nation
Chief Vern Janvier
(780) 881-6989

or

Cook Roberts LLP
Robert Freedman
(250) 818-3719