Carbon capture could be our green panacea
Shell Canada ready to go with project, but Alberta needs regulations and standards to make these plans feasible
Paula Simons
The Edmonton Journal
Saturday, October 18, 2008
You might call carbon capture and storage the great white whale of greenhouse gas reduction.
The premise is so simple. Instead of just cutting our carbon dioxide emissions, we capture the waste CO2, and pump it underground, removing it from the atmosphere indefinitely.
It sounds almost too good to be true -- a technological fix that doesn't mean a drastic reduction in our industrial production or our personal lifestyles. And yet, carbon capture isn't something we should just laugh off as an end run around real CO2 reduction.
Climate change is real, and it's happening now. We can't stop the polar ice caps from melting with LED Christmas lights and cloth grocery bags. We need larger-scale solutions, ones that will allow us to keep our local energy economy functional, while at the same time mitigate rising global temperatures.
Carbon storage is a practical stop-gap measure. It buys the planet time. Time to commercialize other forms of renewable energy, time to develop cars that don't run on gasoline, time to change consumer expectations.
And Alberta, geologically speaking, is an excellent place to pioneer this technology. The Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin, which is also the source of our oil and gas, looks ideal for deep-well CO2 injection. It's estimated that there's room for one gigatonne of CO2 under the Leduc Reef formation alone. We could likely inject 100 years worth of Alberta's carbon production underground and use less than 10 per cent of our storage capacity.
The provincial government, of course, is counting on carbon capture as Alberta's green panacea. The Tory's CO2 reduction strategy assumes carbon capture and storage will account for a boggling 70 per cent of Alberta's emission reductions. Premier Ed Stelmach has even earmarked $2 billion of the forecast surplus to help jump-start carbon capture project in Alberta by 2015.
There are at least a half a dozen Alberta energy companies with carbon capture projects under discussion, but Shell Canada hopes to be one of the first to dip into that $2-billion fund.
This week, the company unveiled a proposal for a major CO2 capture project at its Scotford upgrader near Fort Saskatchewan.
The Quest project would capture about 40 per cent of the upgrader's carbon emissions. The gas would then be compressed into liquid, and injected, via steel pipe, 2.5 kilometres beneath the surface, in the basal Cambrian sands, under dense layers of cap rock. The goal would be to capture and sequester 1.2 megatonnes of CO2 each year.
Shell will drill three to five test wells, over the next six to nine months. If all go well, and the company receives regulatory approval, it hopes to start building the carbon capture facility in 2010, and begin sequestration by 2013.
Shell says the test wells alone will cost $20 million -- though $6.6 million of that will come from the provincial department of technology, through the Alberta Energy Research Institute. (That's a pot of money quite separate from the $2-billion carbon capture kitty.) How much will the final project cost? Shell will only say, coyly, that it will likely be more than $500 million.
Right now, the province charges companies that don't meet their emission reduction targets a $15-a-tonne levy, money that goes into the Climate Change and Emissions Management Fund. Shell estimates it will cost $80 to $140 a tonne to build and operate its proposed carbon capture facility -- meaning it's cheaper to pay the levy than to store the gas.
"The price of carbon will have to be higher in order for these projects to move forward," says Rob Seeley, Shell Canada Energy's general manager of sustainable oilsands development.
While he won't go so far as to call for a carbon tax, Seeley says there must be tougher North America-wide regulation of greenhouse gas emissions in order to convince companies like Shell to invest in carbon capture.
"We need to do this," he says. "The time for action is now. The debate about global warming is over." Yet until North American governments set a true price on carbon, companies will have no incentives to make these huge investments in greenhouse gas mitigation. We need both sticks and carrots, taxes and incentives. Alberta's $2-billion carbon capture fund sounds huge, but it's a pittance, compared to the cost of large-scale carbon capture. The government can't be in the business of bankrolling these projects. Companies themselves have to pay, even if that means passing costs onto consumers.
What the province can do, however, is put in place the regulations and licensing standards, and safety protocols these deep CO2 wells are going to need -- and figure out how to value and divvy up the underground "storage space" which belongs to the Crown.
Time is running out. While politicians bicker over turf and tactics, the temperatures and the seas are rising. If we're serious about making Alberta a world leader in carbon capture and storage, if we're serious about reducing our carbon footprint so that our oil isn't subject to boycotts and trade sanctions, the province has to move quickly to establish the regulatory and tax regimes we need to make such systems work.
