Canada’s new prime minister has touted carbon capture and storage as a way to build Canada’s energy sector. But the technology continues to generate controversy.
“We … can lead in areas such as carbon capture and storage,” said Mark Carney during the party’s English-language leadership debate in February.
However, some are not convinced the technology is safe and effective.
The National Farmers Union, a farmers’ advocacy organization, said in a recent press release that it opposes a carbon capture and storage (CCS) project near Cold Lake, Alta. The project has been proposed by the Pathways Alliance, a coalition of Canada’s six largest oil sands companies.
“There “needs [to be] a full environmental assessment, a federal environmental assessment, to determine that it actually is going to be safe,” said Glenn Norman, a union board member whose private farmland is slated to have a CCS pipeline run through it.
Energy poverty
Carbon capture and storage facilities filter carbon dioxide from industrial emissions, compress the emissions into a liquified state and transport the liquid by pipeline to a storage space at least 800 metres below ground.
Rick Chalaturnyk, a professor of geotechnical engineering at the University of Alberta, says carbon capture and storage provides industries that face significant pressure to reduce their emissions a way to do so — while still continuing to produce goods and energy.
Canada remains heavily reliant on oil and gas. Just 16 per cent of its primary energy supply is provided by renewable energy sources, such as wind and hydro. Finding ways to make fossil fuel production and use sustainable is important, Chalaturnyk says.
Carbon capture and storage “will help us manage energy production, so that we don’t suffer things like energy poverty,” said Chalaturnyk, who also holds a research chair at the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. “We can still get energy to folks, but still manage the emissions on our way to targets.”
Carbon capture and storage projects are increasingly seen as a key solution to reducing emissions. In 2024, the Global CCS Institute think tank identified 50 CCS facilities in operation, five of which are in Canada. Another 628 projects are at some stage of development globally, including 23 CCS projects in Canada.
Proponents of carbon capture and storage say the technology provides a way to combat climate change by reducing the emissions of industrial manufacturers.
“CCS is not just about oil and gas. There are so many set point sources — like cement companies, steel mills, chemical plants — all of which have large amounts of CO2 emissions,” said Norm Sacuta, communications director at the Petroleum Technology Research Centre in Regina.
The main “way for them to get rid of their emissions is with CCS. We have to be serious about considering it as an important technology.”
Julia Levin, associate director of national climate at the advocacy organization Environmental Defence, says the technology poses many risks for the environment and nearby communities.
“The issue with CO2 is, when there’s a leak, CO2 displaces oxygen … And that can, at lower concentrations, [cause] confusion,” said Levin. “At higher concentrations, that’s death.”
In February 2020, a CCS pipeline burst, leaking CO2 gas into the village of Satartia, Miss.
Many residents fell unconscious. Cars stopped working, hampering residents’ efforts to flee and emergency responders’ ability to help. More than 200 of the city’s residents were evacuated and 45 were hospitalized, though no deaths were reported.
Carbon dioxide that is stored underground has the potential to also creep upwards, contaminating drinking water, says Norman, of the National Farmers Union.
“It has the potential to wipe out a farmer’s entire ability to make a living,” he said. “So many of us still use groundwater as a source of water here.”
Sacuta, of the Petroleum Technology Research Centre, says some of the concerns about the risks of CCS are valid. But new projects now have enhanced safety measures, he says. For example, emergency close valves are installed every kilometre on CCS pipelines, and emergency response plans are put in place along pipeline routes.
Sean McCoy, a professor at University of Calgary’s Schulich School of Engineering, says the risk of underground leakage from CCS storage facilities is relatively low. McCoy has helped develop regulations on carbon capture and storage in Canada and the U.S.
Companies monitor the CO2 underground and ground water quality to detect any leakage, he says. And the CO2 is pumped into porous rock under several layers of impermeable rock, which helps trap the gas underground.
The gas could only migrate upwards “through faults, fractures and along wellbores,” McCoy said, referring to wells dug to extract natural resources.
Uncertain future
Tug-of-war negotiations over how much industry or government should foot the bill for CCS projects have stunted the development of CCS sites in Canada, says Chris Severson-Baker, executive director of the Pembina Institute, an energy think tank.
“Nobody can really say for sure exactly which ones are going to happen by when, and at the end of the day, how many we’re going to have,” said Severson-Baker.
Even before a shovel hits the ground, costs can add up. Land slated for the CCS project in Cold Lake runs through private property and Indigenous treaty land, meaning oil companies will need to negotiate with landowners and communities.
Companies have an obligation to consult communities, says Matt Hulse, staff lawyer at Ecojustice, an environmental law charity that is representing Alberta First Nations being consulted on the Cold Lake project.
“The duty of consultation and accommodation means that you’re not just sharing information. You’re actively looking to resolve the issues of the [First Nations], of these Indigenous communities, with respect to the impacts of the project,” said Hulse.
Hulse says the government needs to exercise more oversight of CCS projects to properly take into account the environmental and community impact of the project.
In its February press release, the National Farmers Union called on Ottawa to “complete an Impact Assessment on all sections of the Cold Lake CCS Project, as the Government of Alberta has refused to do so.”
Levin, of Environmental Defence, echoes this call. “We still haven’t heard whether the federal government will do an impact assessment, so that’s not doing the basic due diligence to keep communities safe.”
“The science makes clear that carbon capture and storage (CCS) in the fossil fuel sector cannot adequately compensate for delaying oil and gas production decline, and these technologies do not bear out their promise in practice. The IPCC has shown that CCS is one of the most expensive and least effective measures to cut emissions—while wind and solar energies have the biggest mitigation potential at the lowest cost. After more than 50 years of investment, only 30 large-scale CCS projects are operating worldwide, capturing only 0.1% of emissions.
The IPCC warns that relying too much on carbon capture technology represents a major risk to climate safety. The growing consensus is that CCS for oil and gas won’t be enough and costs too much. IPCC research supports that view.”
https://www.iisd.org/articles/insight/ipcc-ar6-synthesis-report