Canada’s GHG ledger
If Canada’s pollution ledgers accurately reflected the pollution
generated by the products we consume (and fully offset all those
we export), Canada’s CO2 emissions would probably be higher
than they are. Canadians would still not be the world’s biggest per
capita greenhouse gas polluters, though. Honours in that competition go to Australia and the United States, respectively; Canada
only gets the bronze.
The main cause of our high GHG emissions is Canada’s hydrocarbon consumption—at 8,300 kilograms of crude oil equivalent
per person per year, the highest in the world. If that crude oil
equivalent were bottled water, at 2.2 litres per day it would take
a person ten years to drink it all. By using them for fuel instead
of hydration, those hydrocarbons provide us with mobility,
power, and heat, each of which bears an environmental cost.
Every transaction involves a measure of energy produced and
then consumed. And as we consume energy—by trucking goods,
extracting resources, manufacturing products, and turning up
the thermostat—we create greenhouse gases.
We live in a big country, so transportation—often in cold
weather, when fuel efficiency drops—is a big part of the economy.
Nationwide, about 25 per cent of our GHGs come from our trains,
planes, and automobiles—especially our automobiles. Commerce,
residential fuel consumption, and industry (excluding oil and gas)
account for 24 per cent of the total, while 14 per cent comes from
non-energy sources. The rest comes from the production and
manufacture of energy and power.
As Canada creates targets for GHG reductions, policymakers
will zero in on the three areas—transportation, electricity generation, and fossil fuel production—in which the greatest reductions are possible. Together, these activities account for nearly
two-thirds of Canada’s greenhouse gases.
Will Canada’s pollution actually decline? Not according to
Canada’s Energy Outlook, a Natural Resources Canada report
which suggests that Canada’s GHG emissions will increase by
139 million tonnes between 2004 and 2020, with more than one-third of the total coming from petroleum production and refining.
Upstream emissions will decline slightly, primarily from gas field
depletion and from increasing production of coalbed methane,
which requires less processing than conventional natural gas.
Meanwhile, emissions from unconventional resources and
refining will soar.
What is carbon capture and storage? It involves capturing the
carbon emissions from an electric utility or an oilsands plant and
storing them, for example, in depleted oilfields.
This is not new. Carbon dioxide has long been used for
enhanced oil recovery, to urge incremental barrels out of elderly
oilfields. One such project has been operating in the 50-year-
old Weyburn oilfield in Saskatchewan for nearly eight years.
The project uses a 330-kilometre pipeline to transport carbon
dioxide captured at the Great Plains Coal Gasification plant,
which manufactures methane from coal near Beulah, North
Dakota. This project disposes of about 1.5 million tonnes of this
greenhouse gas each year, and also keeps oil flowing from this
aging field.
At present, Weyburn is one of only three such projects in the
world, all of them about the same size. The second is the BP-operated In Salah project in Algeria, where carbon dioxide
extracted from the gas reservoir is removed and reinjected. This
reduces pollution, but the injected gas also plays a role in maintaining reservoir pressure.
The third is Statoil’s Sleipner project, in the Norwegian sector
of the North Sea. There, carbon dioxide extracted from gas production at the Sleipner West gas field is stored in a reservoir 1,000
metres below ground instead of being released to the air. In this
project, injection is strictly a waste management practice. It does
not assist in field production.
Injecting carbon dioxide into old oilfields as a method of
enhanced oil recovery could eventually help the petroleum
industry add 1.2 billion barrels to conventional oil production
in Alberta alone. This, at least, is the view of Suncor Energy’s
Stephen Kaufman, chair of the 16-member ICON.
Using carbon dioxide from an industrial source for enhanced oil
recovery is increasingly economic as energy prices rise. But can
pumping GHGs into the ground be economically viable if it isn’t
being done for a commercial purpose?
According to Kaufman, this is the sticking point. “There is no
value chain for CO2 capture,” he says. “It is extremely difficult
from a pure market standpoint to make it profitable.”
The ICON consortium of mostly blue chip companies with
Alberta operations wants to develop a national GHG collection,
pipeline and storage grid with roots in the Alberta oil industry
and branches across the country—from British Columbia to
Nova Scotia.
In the beginning, the network would capture carbon
dioxide from sources in north-central Alberta, including Fort
McMurray, Fort Saskatchewan, and the coal-fired power plants
near Wabamun Lake, west of Edmonton. The carbon dioxide
would be transported by pipeline to suitable geological sites
for storage and enhanced oil recovery (EOR) locations for sale
to oil producers. About 1,000 kilometres of main pipeline and
400 kilometres of small collector lines would ultimately be
needed for the system, which would be built up over a decade
or more. Longer term, carbon capture could be done elsewhere
in Canada, which has suitable geologic storage basins in nearly
every province and territory.
In effect, ICON is proposing a vast network of waste treatment facilities, and the industry believes sharing the costs of this
network with energy consumers is appropriate since “it is more
difficult and more expensive for consumers to make emission
reductions directly.”
Noting that Canadians will be facing “increasingly stringent
carbon regulations,” Kaufman says those regulations are going
to force energy consumers of all types to find ways to reduce
net emissions.
