A small, conservative movement is growing in Ontario to “reset the conversation” around carbon pricing and bring the centre-right back to an originally-conservative position, one in support of a market-based approach to fighting climate change. But the movement faces an uphill battle.

“It’s very ironic — the idea of carbon pricing, came more from the right than the left originally,” Mark Cameron, executive director for Canadians for Clean Prosperity, and former policy director to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, told DeSmog Canada.

“There are well known conservative economists who endorsed carbon taxes for decades.”

“You don’t need to feel alone, there are a number of people coming into this tent,” said Chris Ragan, chair of the Ecofiscal Commission, associate professor at McGill University and research fellow at the C.D. Howe Institute.

Those hoping for a reset will soon see how the Ontario Progressive Conservative party engages on the topic when the governing Liberals introduce a cap-and-trade plan in the near future.

“It’s coming, it was campaigned on by the Liberals, “ said Progressive Conservative finance critic and Nipissing MPP Vic Fedeli.

Fedeli was the moderator of a recent discussion with Cameron and Ragan on market-based solutions to climate change. The event in downtown Toronto was organized by Blue Skies Ontario, an idea incubator for Ontario’s centre-right (interestingly managed by Jamie Ellerton, formerly of Ethical Oil), and Canadians for Clean Prosperity, a non-profit organization working to educate Canadians about the “benefits of the polluter pay system.”

If the Ontario right does reset the conversation and agree with the left-leaning parties and economists that carbon pricing is the right approach, the debate would become focused on the details: how is the carbon tax or cap-and-trade system set up and what happens to the money? Will the revenue collected go into general government coffers, get spent on developing clean technology, building infrastructure or get returned in tax cuts?

“Once we get to the debate how we should recycle revenue, I’m going home,” Ragan told the crowd during his opening presentation on carbon pricing.

“Once we have gotten to that point, apparently we have accepted the idea that carbon pricing is sensible.”

Ontario Tories at Cross Roads

With the election of Patrick Brown as the leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservatives in May 2015 and then to the legislature in early September, the Ontario Tories have the opportunity to redefine their party’s position on climate change. Brown has in the past come out against the idea of pricing carbon, but Fedeli says Brown is open to ideas if they work.

“He is very quick to suggest to all parties that a good idea can come from any party and he has agreed and vocalized whether if it is a Liberal idea, an NDP idea, or a PC idea, if it is a good idea, our party should be looking at supporting it,” Fedeli said.

The Liberals tried to portray Brown as an extreme social conservative during the by-election based on his voting record as an MP — a label Brown is quick to say is false. On the energy file, the Ontario Tories have for years hammered the Liberals for the mismanagement and cover-up of the cost of cancelling two gas plants. The former Ontario PC leader campaigned in the 2014 provincial election to cancel the Green Energy Act — an act that paid preferential rates to green energy producers — because it caused electricity prices to skyrocket.

Ontario shut down its coal-fired power plants, resulting in a big improvement in air quality, a major reduction in greenhouse gases and eliminated up to $4.4. billion in environmental and health costs. The plan to replace some capacity with green energy significantly underestimated the cost increase to electricity bills.

When Green Energy Act act was introduced in 2009, the Liberals projected a one per cent increase per year in electricity rates, but a 2010 forecast by the Ministry of Energy predicted a 7.9 per cent annual increase, with 56 per cent of the increase coming from renewable energy sources, reported a 2011 Ontario Auditor General report. Ontario electricity prices are now among the highest in the country and may force one in 20 Ontario businesses to close, a recent Ontario Chamber of Commerce report said.

Supporting a price on carbon and by extension a policy to further increase energy prices may prove difficult for the Ontario Tories after years spent hammering the Liberals on the energy file.

Right-wing Idea?

When finding a policy to reverse climate change, there are really only three options that economists say can work: regulation, a carbon tax or cap and trade. 

Regulation can achieve the goal of reducing greenhouse gases but is economically “inefficient” and “moral suasion and green subsidies are ineffective,” according to environmental economist Mark Jaccard and researcher Nic Rivers.

“One of the problems — age old problems — with regulation is that it becomes a source of potential corruption,” Ragan said.

Markets are remarkably flexible in responses to changes, they decentralize power away from a central authority and they drive innovation, but do a poor job of protecting the environment because “we don’t put a price on it,” Ragan said.

Cap and trade and a carbon tax are market mechanisms that leave the decision-making to industry to determine how to cut emissions and beat their competition.

Originally a cap-and-trade scheme was a right-wing idea, implemented by the first Bush administration to successfully reduce ozone-depleting chemicals. The plan, putting a hard cap on emissions and allowing polluters to buy or sell pollution credits to meet the target, gave industry the power to determine what was the best approach. The idea was disempowered the regulators used to overseeing command-and-control regulations and created an economic incentive to cut pollution. As a result, emissions fell by three million tonnes in the first year, well below targets.

A carbon tax sets a price per tonne of carbon emissions, requiring industry to either pay the tax or cut emissions. Granted a new tax, is not normally an idea a right-leaning politician would support to get re-elected, but if it used as a way to cut other taxes — taxes that hinder economic growth — then the argument shifts. Furthermore when compared to regulation or cap-and-trade, it is the most efficient policy tool to implement.

“In B.C., it took them six weeks to implement the carbon tax,” Cameron said.

A cap-and trade system is more administratively complex to set up and the complexity can open the system to exemption and backroom maneuvering, but that can happen with any system, says Ragan.

“We need to hold governments to account for doing what they said they would do,” Ragan said.

Follow the Money

Prime Minister Harper says a carbon tax is a tax grab dressed up as an environmental policy.  A carbon price could be designed in a way to funnel billions into government coffers, but as the British Columbia model demonstrates, all of the money collected is returned to consumers and businesses in the form of revenue neutral tax cuts with accountability baked into the legislation.

“The [B.C.] Auditor General has to certify that the carbon tax is being treated in a revenue-neutral manner,” Cameron said.

The B.C. model demonstrates the tax as an environmental policy can work. Since the tax was implemented, the B.C. GDP per capita grew faster than the Canadian average, the per-person consumption of fuels dropped over 16 per cent, while in the rest of Canada it grew by three per cent, reported the Economist in 2014. Denmark, Ireland, Sweden have all cut emissions using carbon taxes, while Norway’s emission have risen largely because of the boom in their oil production.

Canadian Opinion

78 per cent of the Canadian population believes the climate is changing. Of those who believe the climate is changing, 72 per cent think it is caused by human activity, according to a Forum Research poll. Those numbers drop for conservative voters to 63 and 50 per cent, respectively. The May 2015 poll is considered accurate +/- 3 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

When the climate change debate hits the Ontario provincial floor, the Progressive Conservatives, under their new leader Patrick Brown, will have to weigh the fact that a large segment of their base sees no change in the climate or doesn’t believe humans are too blame.

So will the Progressive Conservatives debate the minutia around revenue neutrality, administrative complexity and industry exemptions or decry the whole exercise as a job killing tax on everything? Time will tell if the conversation gets reset.

When asked if Fideli believed that “climate change is happening and we need to do something about it?”

He said: “Carbon pricing will be presented to the legislature in the fall, we need to be ready to be part of the debate because Kathleen Wynne is going to pass something with or without our input.”

So was that a yes or a no?

Image: Blue Skies Ontario via Twitter

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If oil prices continue their slide downward, the cancellation of high-cost oilsands projects are likely, but just because prices rebounded in the past and investment returned, does not mean that is a guide for the future, warns James Leaton, research director of the Carbon Tracker Initiative.

Thursday night at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Leaton told the crowd of over 170 people the Alberta oilsands are a big target for investors looking to reduce risk because of the high capital expenditure (capex) costs.

“The oilsands are Canada’s elephant in the atmosphere,” said Leaton, an originator of the “carbon bubble” theory. “We see investors moving away from high-cost, high-carbon projects, so there is a challenge that capital is not going to automatically flow to Alberta anymore.”

Source: Carbon Supply Cost Curves: Evaluating Financial Risk to Oil Capital Expenditures from Carbon Tracker Initiative, May 7, 2014.

Investors and oil companies may de-leverage their portfolios of risky projects in the face of new carbon regulation or even from other factors like the decreasing costs of renewable energy, vehicle efficiency improvements in key markets, and economic growth rates in China, Leaton said.

Before the oil price started plummeting, Royal Dutch Shell PLC, Total SA, and Statoil ASA cancelled oilsands projects because of the high costs and lack of access to markets.

In a media conference yesterday finance minister Joe Oliver said the federal government has taken the drop in oil prices into account in its fiscal forecasts.

“When we took into account the oil price decline which had already occurred, we made the assumption that the prices would stay at the low level for the entire period,” Oliver said.

The sinking oil price provides companies an opportunity to re-evaluate the resiliency of their business models and projections that oil demand will keep growing, Leaton told DeSmog Canada in an interview after the talk.

Carbon Bubble theory impacting oil firms

The carbon bubble theory argues oil companies are overvalued based on their proven fossil fuel reserves — a large amount of their reserves are stranded assets because they cannot be burnt if the world is to avoid catastrophic climate change.

Once the carbon bubble, like the tech or housing bubble, pops it would bring dramatic re-evaluation of oil companies, resulting in massive layoffs and major industry restructuring. In Canada, the oilsands represents two per cent of the country’s GDP and 90 per cent of the economic benefit goes to Alberta.

Pressured by activist shareholders, ExxonMobil and Shell have publicly rejected this theory. Shell told their shareholders the methodology underpinning the carbon bubble “has significant gaps,” arguing energy demand growth will keep the world wanting oil for years to come.

In March, Exxon released a 30-page document to shareholders saying they “are confident that none of our hydrocarbon reserves are now or will become stranded.” In reviewing Exxon’s report to shareholders, the Carbon Tracker Initiative found the document, far from assuring stakeholders, underestimated the threat climate action poses to the company’s carbon reserves.

“If some of your biggest shareholders write to and say: ‘we are worried about how you are spending capital’, you should be able to write back on two sheets of paper and explain how you are spending capital, rather than 30 pages of fluffy stuff,” Leaton said.

On Tuesday activist shareholders filed a resolution seeking increased dividends or share buy backs for investors, rather than invest in expensive, carbon-intensive oil projects.

“This shows the investors are not satisfied with the response because it didn’t address their issues,” Leaton said.

Ontario is working with Carbon Tracker

In attendance at the talk, Ontario Environment and Climate Change Minister Glen Murray told Desmog Canada afterwards that his government was conducting extensive stakeholder discussions about a new approach to price carbon in Ontario.

Included in those discussions are conversations with the financial industry about potential stranded assets. Three of Canada’s five big banks are the largest investors in the oilsands.

“We are working with Jim and Carbon Tracker to develop that policy discussion…” to bring forward to the financial industry, Murray said.

Influencing activism

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers predicts oilsands production to double from nearly 2 million barrels a day to over 4 million by 2025.*

Tim Gray, executive director of Environmental Defence, also spoke at the talk and told Desmog Canada the public doesn't want the pipelines to help fuel the rapid expansion of the oilsands.

“There are two billion barrels of production there a day and that will continue to generate revenue,” Gray said. “Those are relatively low cost assets…Why not use the wealth being generated from the current level of development to invest it that [low-carbon economy] transition.”

“What the Carbon Tracker Initiative has done is show that putting all of our eggs into the tar sands basket is a very risky economic move,” Keith Stewart, climate and energy campaigner with Greenpeace Canada, said. “We could end up with multi-billion dollar white elephants which are weighing our economy down and miss out on the green-energy revolution which could lift us up.”

The event was organized by Environmental Defence and The Pembina Institute.

*An earlier version of this article stated billions, rather than millions, of barrels.

Image Credit: Kris Krug

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Climate change “has moved firmly into the present" as “evidence of human-induced climate change continues to strengthen” and “impacts are increasing across the country,” concluded a recent in-depth U.S. government report.

With no equivalent in Canada of the U.S. team of “300 experts guided by a 60-member Federal Advisory Committee” to prepare a report on climate impacts in Canada, DeSmog Canada has made its own report. And by report, we mean a list of… the top five craziest climate change impacts in Canada. Drum roll please….

Mind Altering

In Canada’s north, where average Arctic temperatures have increased at almost twice the global rate, dramatic changes amplified by human-induced global warming are underway. 

The warming climate is altering the way of life for Nunatsiavut Inuit communities along the coast of northern Labrador – communities only accessible in the winter by plane or snowmobile. Earlier springs and later winters are interrupting the Inuit’s ability to “hunt, fish, trap, and visit cabins,” researchers report. The changes are increasing mental stress, family strife, drug and alcohol abuse, suicide ideation and amplifying previous trauma.

One Nunatsiavut resident told researchers:

"We are land people, so if we don’t get out then, for our mental well-being it’s like things… it’s like taking part of your arm away. It’s like you are not fulfilled. There is just really something missing."

A new documentary about these communities and the research by the Inuit Mental Health and Adaptations to Climate Change (IMHACC) project was met by a tearful reaction at its recent premiere, reported CBC North.

Winter Flies

The rapid Arctic warming may also be “at least partly responsible” for our recent wild winters, says Jennifer Francis, climate scientist at Rutgers University. The research is developing, but her team’s theory is that the warming Arctic is disrupting the jet stream causing it to become wobbly, resulting in weather patterns sticking around longer in one place. 

The winter without snow in 2012 and the bone-chilling cold Polar Vortex of 2014 “occurred during these very wavy jet stream patterns,” but “the waves of the jet stream were located in a different place,” Francis told DeSmog Canada.

Other recent climate research says the extreme Polar Vortex winter was caused by heavy precipitation in the western tropical Pacific Ocean. A natural cycle amped up by climate change induced the extra large waves in the jet stream, concludes Tim Palmer, a climate scientist from the University of Oxford.

“It is not a simple story,” Francis said. “The rapid Arctic warming is clearly having an impact on the larger circulation, but it is not the only game in town.”

The warm winter in 2012 was also followed by a hot and dry summer. It brought drought to central and eastern Canada, starved baby puffins off the coast of Main and New Brunswick and induced the perfect storm of conditions to infest one small Ontario farming town with houseflies.

“In our home, we’re killing an average of between 60 and 100 flies a day. My children are finding it hard to deal with when playing outside or even having dinner,” one resident of Beamsville, Ont. told the St. Catharines Standard.

10 Million and Counting

In 2013, 25 years of smooth sea scallop farming at Island Sea Scallops suddenly came to an end. Years of dealing with a 10 per cent mortality rate, suddenly hit 90 to 95 per cent, CEO Rob Saunders told DeSmog Canada from his office in Qualicum Beach, B.C.

Over 10 million scallops died from the 2010, 2011 and 2012 batches. It was an unprecedented die-off and Saunders attributes their deaths to an increasingly acidic ocean. Saunders’ tests reveal the pH balance of the water used in his nursery dropped from the average of 8.2 to 7.2.

Some uncertainty still remains as to the cause of the die-off, but scientists have shown the growing amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is increasing the acidity of the oceans and inhibiting “the development and survival of larval shellfish.”

The Vancouver Aquarium’s records show the pH level in the Vancouver harbour has dropped from 8.1 in the 1970s to a low of 7.3 in 2001. And shellfish farmers up the Pacific Coast have been reporting massive die-offs for almost a decade.

“A lot of people criticize me, saying you can’t prove it and of course I can’t, but the correlation is pretty strong,” says Saunders.

Islands Scallops along with the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans are undertaking a research project to determine the root cause of the massive scallop die off.

This year, Island Scallops introduced a new heartier species of scallop and quickened harvest rates, “because we don’t expect the animals to live for two years,” said Saunders. The pH level is up a bit to 7.6, but Saunders is still seeing a 40 to 50 per cent mortality rate.

“Am I feeling desperate – absolutely,” said Saunders “If you want to maintain a coastal industry, then we are going to need some help – we are going to need some help now, not two years from now.”

Semifrost

In 2010, the Quebec Arctic village of Salluit saw its roads bend and fire hall sink from the thawing permafrost. Across the Arctic, from Dawson City, Yukon to Iqaluit, Nunavut buildings erected directly on frozen ground are sinking from the thawing permafrost, costing millions in repairs.

The north’s entire infrastructure is under threat because “pipelines, electrical transmission lines and railways are only as strong as their weakest point. If one section is destabilized, the entire supply could go,” writes Cleo Paskal in 2009 article.

Permafrost covers 24 per cent of exposed land in the Northern Hemisphere and “large-scale thawing of permafrost may have already started,” concludes a 2012 UN report.

The melting permafrost threatens to cause organic matter locked under the ice to thaw and decay, releasing vast amounts of methane and carbon dioxide. The methane release from just the East Siberian Sea could unleash an “economic timebomb” costing $60 trillion, researchers estimate.

Ticked Off

A disease is growing in Canada by the hundreds each year all thanks to climate change. In many parts of the country that were once disease free, doctors are miss-diagnosing it, leaving people sick for years.

Blacklegged ticks carrying Lyme disease have increased by tenfold in the last twenty years. Carried on the backs of migratory birds, the warming temperatures have expanded the tick’s range across southern Canada. In 2010, its range covered 18 per cent of inhabited areas of eastern Canada, but researchers expect it to expand to 80 per cent by 2020.

“Lyme disease is on the rise in Canada, yet diagnostics, treatment and public awareness are largely inadequate,” says the Canadian Lyme Disease Foundation’s website.

Green Party Leader Elizabeth May's private members bill to create a National Lyme Disease Strategy to improve public awareness, prevention and sharing best practices just came back from committee and will likely pass this summer.

Image Credit: Exposed permafrost in the Mackenzie Delta region of the Northwest Territories. Photo by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.

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As cuts to federal science budgets continue, former government scientists and academics who’ve lost their funding say the cuts have upended their careers, compromised knowledge about Canada’s environment and undercut the development of the next generation of scientists.

The cuts were cast into the national spotlight earlier this year when CBC’s Fifth Estate ran an episode called Silence of the Labs.  

As the list of affected departments grows, DeSmog Canada has reached out to former government and university scientists to hear their stories.

Mercury and Climate Unwatched?

Britt Hall, a biogeochemist at the University of Regina, would travel every summer to the Experimental Lakes Area (ELA), a freshwater research institute, to study the way chemicals move in the environment. [view:in_this_series=block_1]

There, she examined mercury, a neurotoxin, found in the environment naturally, but predominantly from burning coal for electricity.

Thomas Duck, a climate scientist at Dalhousie University, spent 18 years travelling to a remote weather station on Ellesmere Island in the Arctic to do climate science at the Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory in Eureka, Nunavut.

Both Duck and Hall worked at world-renowned research institutes that faced elimination in 2012 — and then were saved, but their careers have by no means returned to normal.

The ups and downs of the Experimental Lakes Area’s 58 lakes in northwest Ontario have been well recorded in the media. When the federal government chopped the area’s $2-million annual funding in May 2012, world-renowned scientists decried the cuts.

All seemed lost until the Ontario and Manitoba governments stepped in to support the International Institute for Sustainable Development as the new manager.

For seven years, Hall and other scientists had been feeding a lake, a forest and a wetland with mercury at the Experimental Lakes Area. They were studying how long it takes mercury to leave fish when the doors were shut.

Funding for Duck’s polar lab dried up after the Harper government cut off money to the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences, a fund for climate science created by the Chretien government.

Running on reserves until early 2012, the lab was forced to close for part of the year when it couldn’t secure $1.5 million in annual funding. Then, a year and a bit later, the government stepped in with $1-million-a-year for five years.

Prior to the doors closing, Duck was working on “cutting edge” research into how the atmosphere and permafrost were interacting. The Arctic’s infrastructure — roads, buildings and bridges — is built on the permafrost and if it melts “we have real problems,” Duck says.

A recent survey of Arctic dwellers found residents want research to be focused on issues relevant to their daily lives. 

Just because the Experimental Lakes Area and the Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory were saved doesn’t mean Hall and Duck’s return is certain, however.

“I am hoping to get out there [the ELA], so we will see if I can scrape together a small amount of money to go,” says Hall, who says she lost her funding as a result of a fundamental reordering of the way science is funded in Canada.

Duck, meanwhile, says funding was restored — 40 per cent lower than the original amount — but the closure kneecapped his research and gutted his capacity to carry on research into the impact of climate change on the permafrost.

“It took the ability to even propose these kinds of ideas out of our hands — the loss of capacity meant we could no longer make a credible case for it,” he says.

Disappearing Dollars

For environmental scientists, the main source of funding for research has traditionally been the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Hall says.

Changes to the council over the last few years cut back money for discovery grants for blue-sky science and shifted internal money to research with an industry partner. These changes resulted in Hall losing her discovery grant, she said.

She contacted three industries that release mercury, but to no avail.

“I can’t solve a problem for industry,” Hall says. “I can help study the release of the mercury, but I can’t stop their mercury release — I am not an engineer.”

Disappearing support for research that doesn’t directly benefit industry was a story we also heard from former federal forestry scientist Philp Burton. He told DeSmog Canada in Part 1 of our Cuts to Science series that this is the first time in his 30-year career he has run out of ideas on where to look for research dollars.

In addition to the changes at the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, “there are no other programs specifically related to forestry as there had been in the past,” Burton said.

Lost Capacity

Duck’s team at Eureka helped build a $1.2-million advanced laser radar called lidar, but it’s currently turned off and “its future remains somewhat in doubt,” Duck says.

When the polar lab closed, Duck went from working with 10 people — undergraduate and graduate students, research associates, and a senior scientist — to having one graduate student. All of the instrument operators, who were highly skilled at operating 25 different complex instruments in the hostile Arctic environment, were laid-off, Duck says.

“It was a loss of exceptional people…it also breaks the chain in training graduate students,” Duck added.

The two-year break halted the cycle of senior graduate students passing their knowledge onto junior graduates, resulting in huge loss of “institutional knowledge and capabilities.”

Hall echoes the sentiment. Losing federal funding halted her research and dropped the number of students working under her from around five to one (who is only there because he gets his salary from someone else), she said.

“That engine of training scientists, training students to be scientists, and producing new knowledge basically stopped,” Hall says. “I have seen it throughout my entire department.”

If more funding for research does not become available, Hall says she would take on more teaching responsibilities, while Duck is contemplating changing his research focus after such a major setback.

“This was a life-changing event,” Duck says.

Photo: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

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This is Part 1 of the series "Science on the Chopping Block," an in-depth look at federal cuts to science programs in Canada and what they mean for some of the country's most important researchers.

As cuts to science budgets and programs continue by the federal government, former scientists and academics who’ve lost their funding say the cuts have upended their careers, compromised knowledge about Canada’s environment and undercut development of the next generation of scientists.

Since the cuts began about five years ago, the federal government has either reduced funding or shut down more than 150 science-related programs and research centres and dismissed more than 2,000 scientists.

With the recently announced cuts to Environment Canada, by 2017 the department will be operating with close to 30 per cent fewer dollars than it had in 2012.  

As the impacts of the cuts grow, DeSmog Canada has reached out to former government and university scientists to hear their stories.

Unwatched Parks?

When Dana Haggarty started at Parks Canada in 2007, her job was to take stock of the ecological integrity of Nahanni National Park Reserve in the Northwest Territories. Haggarty saw it as “a dream position” at an organization where she “saw room for growth.” [view:in_this_series=block_1]

It was an exciting time. In 2005, the auditor general had found gaps in the monitoring of parks and Parks Canada was feverishly working to improve its knowledge of regions like Nahanni National Park.

Haggarty, along with other researchers at Parks Canada, was getting ready to announce an expanded boundary for Nahanni in 2009.

Already understaffed and overworked, Haggarty and fellow scientists worked “their butts off” to complete their part of the State of Parks report. The report, produced every five years, provided decision-makers with science-based evidence to help them direct resources.

Haggarty, excited about the future, decided to go on unpaid educational leave to get a PhD in marine biology, focusing on rockfish conservation. She saw it as a career-building move and she wanted to return to Parks Canada and work on restoration efforts along the Pacific coast.

Then major cuts came in 2012. Parks Canada had $29.2-million cut from its budget and 638 jobs were deemed surplus. The cuts drastically affected Parks Canada’s regional service centres, which were consolidated across the country. For her work in the remote area of Nahanni, Haggerty depended heavily on the experienced scientists at the local regional service centre.

She was “just floored” when her mentor Phil Lee’s job was deemed surplus. Lee provided support to scientists in fields in all of the western and northwestern parks, she said.

“There was no way I could do my job without Phil,” Haggarty said. “It said they were absolutely not committed to ecological integrity or basically doing science in parks.”

After the cuts, Haggarty’s position was still available in Nahanni, but there was a lot of confusion around it, she said. On cusp of finishing her PhD, Haggarty saw all of the coastal parks positions she’d hoped to have some day eliminated, so she gave up her job.

“I had such a bad taste in my mouth over what happened to science at Parks Canada. The program that I had worked so hard on and cared so much about was just gutted,” she said.

In response to a previous criticism of its ecological integrity program, Parks Canada said the scientists were hired to develop monitoring programs, but now the agency was moving to another phase of the work.

A 2013 auditor general report stated Parks Canada “has been slow to implement systems for monitoring and reporting on ecological integrity. It has failed to meet many deadlines and targets, and information for decision making is often incomplete or has not been produced.” 

In an e-mail response to questions from DeSmog Canada, Mélissa Larose, a Parks Canada media relations officer, said: “Parks Canada will continue to undertake priority natural resource conservation actions, including species at risk recovery, in national parks and national marine conservation areas that result in tangible and measurable conservation outcomes.”

Haggarty is now considering postdoctoral research, consulting work or moving into the private sector. She would return to Parks Canada if commitments were made to fund the science, she said.

Forgotten Forests?

At one time, Philip Burton managed a multi-disciplinary team of 12 people studying the mountain pine beetle epidemic for the Pacific Forestry Centre.

During the last decade, the beetle — fuelled by climate change — went on an unprecedented tear across British Columbia, infesting and killing large swaths of lodgepole pine trees.

The beetle then expanded beyond its historical range jumping the Rockies into Alberta, the Yukon and the Northwest Territories. Today, as Saskatchewan gears up for its battle with the beetle, scientists fear the problem could jump to the boreal forest, potentially spreading across Canada.

It’s after the beetle tears through an area that the story gets interesting, Burton says. How is the forest going to recover? What needs to be done to make the forest more resilient to future pests, especially in a changing climate?

“Just as we were getting to the more interesting aspects of the problem, the plug was pulled,” Burton said.

Jacinthe Perras, spokesperson for Natural Resources Canada, said in an email response to questions that “research on mountain pine beetle is ongoing, including field study in all affected parts of British Columbia, Alberta and beyond.

Burton agrees other aspects of the beetle’s biology are being studied however “field study in all affected parts” is “physically impossible,” he said. Furthermore, even though studies continue “field-based research has clearly decreased over the last many years, with a growing emphasis on policy support, remote sensing, and simulation modelling instead,” he said.

Burton’s position was eliminated and his office in Prince George, connected to the University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC), was consolidated with a Victoria location. He had the opportunity to re-apply as a research scientist in Victoria, but declined.

“All employees at UNBC were offered the opportunity to continue their work at the lab in Victoria,” Perras, from Natural Resources Canada, said.

After the pine beetle epidemic moved through British Columbia, the provincial government closed its forest research division and unsustainably ramped up harvest rates to capture the dying pine trees and bycatch, Burton said.

“We are back into 1890s Gold Rush mentality instead of thoughtful planning for the future,” he said.

Burton stayed in the north in Terrace, B.C., working at a satellite campus of UNBC as the regional chair of ecosystem science and management. He was hired to grow the science program, but is doing limited new science.

“In a 30-year career, this is first time where I have run out of ideas as to where to apply for research funding to support field research for graduate students,” Burton said. “The funding is really poor unless you are going to partner up with industry.”

Image Credit: DeSmog Canada

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Days after another delay by the Obama administration on TransCanada's Keystone XL pipeline, members of the Alberta government are hitting the U.S. circuit to promote the oilsands and boost their “green” credentials.

Three government officials are heading to key regions in the U.S. to push for continued market access and advertise what Albertan energy minister Diana McQueen calls “our commitment to clean energy development.”

Alberta hopes to showcase investment in carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology as part of a successful emissions reduction plan.

Critics say the Alberta government’s talk about “sustainability” and “clean energy” is not in line with reality.

“If you’ve been following the Canadian government’s sales pitch for the Keystone XL pipeline, you’ve probably heard this claim before: ‘Emissions per barrel have been reduced by 26 per cent between 1990 and 2011,’” writes P.J. Partington, senior federal policy analyst with the Pembina Institute.

However, the reality, Partington writes, is that “since 1990, oilsands production has quintupled, while GHG emissions from production and upgrading have quadrupled.”

Partington writes: "[The above graph] shows the close relationship between annual GHG emissions and the rate of production — especially in recent years."

University of Alberta energy economist Andrew Leach wrote this week that Canada's incoherence on climate change has killed Keystone XL.

"As an antidote to our lack of ambition on policies, our governments both in Edmonton and in Ottawa have decided to work on an ambitious program of wordsmithing," Leach wrote in Macleans.

Partington notes the oilsands sector already emits as much carbon pollution as the entire province of British Columbia, and production is projected to double within a decade. Trends in the sector’s GHG performance will therefore have a huge impact on emissions levels and major consequences for Canada.

The sales team

Cal Dallas, Alberta Minister of International and Intergovernmental Relations, is in Seattle, Wash., this week to attend the Pacific Energy Forum (April 23-25). According to the Alberta press release, Dallas will use the opportunity to drum up foreign investment interests in the oilsands and advertise extraction technologies.

“We want to work with Asian partners to better understand how to unlock their unconventional resources in an environmentally sustainable way while encouraging investment in our energy resources,” Dallas said.

“Alberta is known to be at the forefront of responsible, sustainable and innovative energy development.”

Dallas will discuss the “importance of energy trade to future economic prosperity” although it is unclear how he will address Alberta’s emissions problems, or the threat climate change poses to heavy hydrocarbon assets.

As DeSmog Canada recently reported, ExxonMobil will soon begin disclosing the risk its carbon assets face given international pressure to address climate change.

Leach recently outlined how the oilsands will quickly become unviable in the face of carbon market policies the Alberta and Canadian governments will have little control over. According to Leach’s analysis the oilsands would become uneconomic with even $50/tonne price on carbon.

According to Nicole Leonard, Canadian oil energy analyst at Bentek, oilsands production is expected to increase by 400,000 barrels a day by 2017.

Concerns are mounting, however, that Alberta's failure to adequately address emissions output will create undue risk for potential oilsands investors.

“All leading energy system analysts agree that the oil sands, and other unconventional oils, should not be rapidly expanding,” said energy economist Mark Jaccard. International efforts are geared toward limiting global temperature increases below 2 °C.

Energy Minister Diana McQueen will also travel this week to Pittsburg, Pa., to deliver a keynote speech at the 13th annual Carbon Capture Utilization and Storage Conference (April 28-May 1) and then to New York to promote Alberta to the investment community.

David Dorward, MLA for Edmonton-Gold Bar, will be in Washington, D.C., April 27 to May 2 to meet with the Port-to-Plains Alliance, a business and government consortium representing the economic corridor from Alberta to Texas.

Dorward will work to advance the “Building Alberta Plan,” a provincial project that hopes to strengthen trade by “opening new markets for Alberta’s resources.”

CCS uncertain

At the carbon capture event, McQueen will discuss how Alberta’s two CCS projects demonstrate Alberta’s “commitment to clean energy development.”

Alberta has committed to invest $1.3 billion over 15 years in the Shell Canada Quest carbon capture project to capture waste carbon from its Scotford upgrader and the Enhance Energy Inc. Carbon Trunk Line to capture waste carbon to be used in enhanced oil recovery operations. Shell is half-way completed its project and Enhanced said it would begin constructing its carbon pipeline this spring.

Despite the two projects moving forward, Alberta originally committed to investing in four CCS projects, but two were cancelled after the companies involved deemed the return on investment insufficient.

With only two CCS operations, Alberta is expected to sequester at best three or four million tonnes of carbon a year by 2020 — just a tenth of the province’s CCS target.

“Those two CCS projects are crucial areas of research that are necessary to develop the technology and it is great that the Alberta government has taken action,” says Andrew Read, technical and policy analyst at the Pembina Institute, adding that it was “unfortunate” the investment in CCS hasn’t come with other actions to help cut greenhouse gas emissions in Alberta.

Emissions still rising rapidly

Today, emissions from the oil and gas sector are the largest source of emissions in Canada, surpassing the transportation sector, according to a recently released Environment Canada report, covering the period from 1990 to 2012.

Alberta has also worked to develop a favourable regulatory framework for future CCS projects, but new projects are unlikely without either continued massive government support or a market-altering price on carbon. To be viable, Alberta needs a price on carbon of at least $70 a tonne for CCS technology on upgraders and rising to between $120 to $160 a tonne for CCS technology to be possible for new steam-assisted oilsands operations, according to ICO2N, a Canadian industry-funded group working to advance CCS technology.

“[CCS] is one of the tools in the tool box but it is at the bottom of the toolbox,” John Bennett, executive director of the Sierra Club Canada Foundation told DeSmog Canada. “There are a thousand things that are more cost effective and useful before we [employ CCS] and as long as it is used to extract more fossil fuels, it is not a solution to the problem.”

GHG regulations?

Since 2007, Alberta has required heavy emitters to pay $15 a tonne into a technology fund if they don’t reduce the intensity of their emissions by 12 per cent from baseline levels.

“Alberta’s plan allows companies to pay a small fee to put carbon into the air and then it gives them back the money, so it is not a system that is moving investments into alternatives,” Bennett says. “Any policy that allows the net amount of carbon dioxide emissions to increase is wrong.”

This time last year, Alberta shocked the federal government and the oil industry with a plan to demand a 40 per cent reduction in per-barrel emissions and a $40 per tonne price on emissions that exceed that amount. The plan has since failed to be implemented while Ottawa announced a delay of federal oil and gas greenhouse gas regulations until they can be done “in concert with” the United States.

“The reality of the situation isn’t aligning with [the Alberta government’s] speaking points,” says Read. “I am not sure what they are reporting to decision makers [in the U.S.] because there hasn’t been any progress on developing oil and gas GHG regulations.”

The environmental movement in the United States has seized on Alberta’s environmental record in opposing the Keystone XL pipeline. The $5.4 billion pipeline is proposed to pump 830,000 barrels a day from Alberta to the U.S. Gulf Coast. Currently, the southern leg is in operation, but the approval of the northern leg crossing the border sits with the Obama administration for final approval.

After the recent delay, a final decision isn’t expected until 2015.

Image Credit: Julia Kilpatrick, Pembina Institute

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When you think about what Canada is known for on the international stage these days, fighting climate change is not exactly near the top of the list. Without credible plans from Ottawa and many provincial capitals, Canada’s climate-fighting reputation is up in smoke or, as the Economist put it, the moose has lost its sunglasses and Canada is “uncool.”

But when you look beyond the headlines, there is another story — one in which the vast majority of Canadian communities are committed to fighting climate change.

DeSmog Canada reached out to experts across Canada to get their opinions on which municipalities are leading the fight against climate change. Immediately, it became clear we could easily list Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton or Vancouver and tell great stories about these innovative cities.

Vancouver, for instance, nominated most often by the experts, is reforming its bylaws, permits, regulations and policies in an effort to become the greenest city in the world by 2020. Whether it is energy, food, grants, efficiency, jobs, bikes, procurement or construction, Vancouver has a sustainability policy, subsidy or project. Add in the work Surrey, Burnaby and the City of North Vancouver are doing to evolve from Vancouver bedroom communities into sustainable urban environments and the story could start and end in the Lower Mainland.

But we wanted to look beyond the big players to find the other guys — the innovative communities you probably haven’t heard about yet. Drum roll please …

Dawson Creek, B.C.

Dawson Creek, at "Mile 0" on the Alaska Highway, sits in the middle of B.C.'s natural gas fields. Photo: Shawn via Flickr.

Way up in the Peace Country, 400 kilometres northeast of Prince George, lays Dawson Creek — a city of fewer than 12,000 people in the heart of British Columbia’s natural gas fields.

During the last decade, the town has installed solar hot-water heaters on municipal buildings, changed its building-code bylaws to require every new house to be built “solar ready,” started charging a $100-per-tonne levy on greenhouse gas emissions and channeled the cash into a carbon fund, developed an anti-idling campaign, embraced a nearby wind farm and in 2012 became Canada’s first Solar City.

During this sustainability boom, the region also saw a massive influx of development from hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, of natural gas wells. Fracking requires large amounts of water, combined with chemicals, used to blast the natural gas from the shale rock formations. Faced with repeat drought years, Dawson Creek partnered with Shell to build a water-reclamation plant to provide water to industry and preserve the town’s drinking water.

"Now we have about 4,000 cubic metres of water a day going through this effluent plant that can be used for fracking instead of surface water or the city's treated water," former mayor Mike Bernier told Postmedia.

Guelph, Ontario

A footbridge in Riverside Park, Guelph. Photo: Patty O'Hearn Kickham via Flickr.

Guelph, Ont., located 90 kilometres west of Toronto, was the winner of the 2014 Sustainable Communities Award for Energy from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. The city, population 120,000, has leveraged Ontario’s green energy policies to develop close to 1,000 solar installations and has cut emissions by capturing methane from the landfill and composting organics.

Since 2006, Guelph has cut emissions per capita by 17 per cent. (The city was also helped by Ontario’s policy of phasing out coal-fired power plants). Guelph is aiming to have two district-energy systems operational by this year or next to provide hot or cool water from a central plant to customers, reducing emissions even more.

“By 2031 we’re expecting to add approximately 50 per cent more in population and a per capita reduction of 60 per cent in greenhouse gas emissions,” says mayor Karen Farbridge.

Varennes, Quebec     

The Saint-Joachim Chapel was built in 1832 in Varennes, Quebec. Now the city is leading the way to the low-carbon future with several technology research centres calling Varennes home. Photo: Gilles Douaire via Flickr.

Varennes, Que., located about 25 kilometres from Montreal, is home to a number of technology research centres, including Hydro-Québec’s IREQ, CanmetENERGY and the National Institute for Scientific Research. It is also the home office of the biggest biofuel producer in Canada, Greenfield Ethanol.

Greenfield is building an ethanol plant in Varennes using non-recyclable, non-compostable waste and an anaerobic digester, using organic waste from the surrounding area to produce biogas. 

The City of Varennes is replacing its city lights with energy efficient LEDs, using electric cars (with seven charging stations in the city) and building a new net-zero library — the first in net-zero building in Canada.

“Its yearly energy consumption will be zero thanks to geothermal technology, 700 solar panels, radiating floors, solar walls and smart lighting,” says mayor Martin Damphouse.

T’Sou-ke First Nation, B.C.

T'Sou-ke Chief Gordon Planes amongst a sea of solar panels. Photo: David Dodge, Green Energy Futures

About 40 kilometres west of Victoria on Vancouver Island is the T’Sou-ke First Nation. It is a tiny community of 250 members (150 on reserve), but it has a claim to fame as British Columbia’s “most solar-powered community.”

In 2009, through B.C.’s Solar Community Program, the T’Sou-ke Nation installed 75 kilowatts of solar power and now sells excess power back to the grid. All homes on the reserve have solar hot-water systems and have had energy-efficiency retrofits. The community also built a greenhouse and runs a community garden, selling extra produce to roughly 30 stores on southern Vancouver Island.

“When you think about the T’Sou-ke Nation, this tiny group on the edge of Vancouver Island, developing probably the most solar-intensive community in Canada, it is quite an achievement,” says Andrew More, T’Sou-ke solar program manager.

Most recently, the T’Sou-ke Nation became a partner in a $750-million wind-power project that will produce enough energy to power 30,000 homes.

Bridgewater, Nova Scotia   

Bridgewater Farmers' Market. Photo: John McCarthy via Flickr.

Bridgewater, located about 100 kilometers down the south shore of Nova Scotia from Halifax, has transformed its community’s energy system. Bolstered by provincial policies, the town of more than 8,000, has replaced street lights with LED lights, conducted energy efficiency retrofits to municipal buildings, introduced an anti-idling program, changed land-use policies and started buying locally installed solar power.

As a result of the major overhaul, Bridgewater reduced energy consumption from its town’s facilitates in 2012 by 15 per cent from 2007 levels and exceeded its goal to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 15 per cent.

“I take particular pride in knowing that our town has done an exemplary job in dealing with sustainability planning,” says Mayor Carroll Publicover.

Main Photo: Dawson Creek grain elevator. Credit: Shannon via Flickr.

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A photographer who has shot for National Geographic Traveller is setting out on a road trip along the proposed route of the TransCanada Energy East pipeline. Robert van Waarden is trying to crowdsource $10,000 to partially cover the costs of his project to put a human face on the proposed $1.2 billion project.

“There is an opportunity to tell the personal story about how people along the line feel,” van Waarden says about his motivation to capture stories from a cross section of Canadians stretching from “the fisherman on Grand Manan Island to the farmer in Saskatchewan.”

Energy East is a massive project proposed by TransCanada Corp. to bring 1.1 million barrels a day of western oil to eastern markets along a 4,600-kilometre pipeline. It involves the conversion of an existing gas pipeline, the development of 72 new pumping stations along the route and new pipelines to connect the line from the oilsands in Alberta to Quebec City and then on to St. John, N.B.

“This is going to cross so much Canadian land and waterways and First Nations land and it’s going to have a big impact,” van Waarden says.

Image credit: Robert van Waarden

Supporters of the proposal describe Energy East as a 'nation-building' piece of infrastructure to eliminate Eastern Canada’s dependency on imported oil. A report prepared for TransCanada estimated the pipeline would create more than 10,000 jobs and generate $10 billion in GDP during the construction phase and sustain 1,000 direct full-time jobs during the 40-year lifespan of the project.

The Pembina Institute, a sustainable energy think tank, says the oil needed to fill Energy East would generate up to 32 million tonnes of additional carbon dioxide emissions each year – 50 per cent more than the Keystone XL pipeline.

“Many people will talk about the climate impact of the pipeline, but less people will inherently understand what it will be like to live along the route,” Adam Scott, a program manager at Environmental Defence, says. “Robert’s work is a really important way for people to make an emotional connection.”

The Energy East pipeline would cross many farmer's fields, like this one in Rigaud, Quebec. Image credit: Robert van Waarden

Environmental Defence and Greenpeace Quebec have provided some seed funding for van Waarden’s project and the crowd-funded money is meant to fill the gap. Van Waarden plans to complement his images with multi-media stories featuring the voices of the people he encounters in his travels. Scott says Environmental Defence wants to take large prints of the final images on tour to communities along the proposed pipeline.

Van Waarden studied photography at the Western Academy of Photography in Victoria in 2004. His publication credits include National Geographic Traveller, Canadian Geographic and CNN. His photos have been featured in solo exhibits in London, England, Ottawa, Washington, D.C., and Cairo. For his Along the Pipeline project, van Waarden will be shooting with a film camera, a Toyo 4×5, because he “really wanted to slow it down a notch.”

In early March, TransCanada submitted a project description to the National Energy Board and is expected to file for full regulatory approval this summer. The federal Conservatives, Liberals and NDP, as well as every provincial premier along the route, are publicly in support of the project.

Visit van Waarden's Indiegogo campaign page.

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Canada has no commercial geothermal power plants, despite having abundant potential and, ironically, Canadian energy companies running geothermal power plants around the world.

Canada’s west coast forms part of the Pacific Ring of Fire, a giant horseshoe of active volcanoes and earthquake zones stretching from New Zealand all the way around Alaska to the bottom of South America. The geology putting coastal cities at risk also makes the area great for developing geothermal resources.

Ring of Fire countries New Zealand, Indonesia, the Philippines, the United States and Mexico all have commercial geothermal plants, but not Canada. A groundbreaking 2010 study of Canada’s geothermal potential found the best locations were in British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan, but even Ontario could produce geothermal power if someone dug deep enough.

To develop a geothermal power plant, a firm needs to drill a well deep into the ground to extract hot water to generate steam to turn an electrical turbine. The water is then recycled through another well back underground. The most important factors are the temperature of the extracted water and the flow rate – the hotter the water and the more of it, the better.

Under the right conditions, geothermal energy is generally cheaper than all other forms of electricity generation over the entire life span of a power plant, according to a 2009 report from investment bank Credit Suisse.

As solar and wind energy development has taken off in Canada in the last decade, geothermal – an energy that doesn’t depend on the weather – has not. DeSmog Canada asked Canadian geothermal companies and experts to find out why?

1. Blessed with cheap resources

Canada’s best geothermal plays, where you have to dig the least distance and the water is hottest, are in British Columbia and the Yukon. Both regions are also blessed with cheap and clean hydropower from long-running generating stations. B.C.’s power rate has been traditionally so low, new entrants face too steep a hurdle to compete with existing capacity.

“BC Hydro for 20-30 years has had three to five cents power and that is not something geothermal could have competed against,” Craig Dunn, chief geologist at Borealis GeoPower, a Calgary-based geothermal company, told Desmog Canada.

BC Hydro is trying to moved ahead with plans to develop a new massive hydro station, the Site C dam on the Peace River, which hits a cost point where geothermal is “at par or better,” says Dunn.

In its presentation to the joint review panel on Site C, the non-profit industry group, the Canadian Geothermal Energy Association (CanGEA), said geothermal would be cheaper, create more jobs and be more environmentally friendly than Site C. The argument does not appear to have persuaded BC Hydro, causing the industry to be in at a standstill in B.C.

“If there is no viable new place to sell power in the province, then no one is going to go out and locate those commercially viable wells because they cost millions of dollars,” John Carson, chief executive officer of Alterra Power Corp., told DeSmog Canada. Alterra is a renewable energy company based in Vancouver with run-of-the-river hydro projects in B.C. and geothermal power plants in Iceland and Nevada.

BC Hydro was contacted to comment on this story but did not reply to our request in time for publication.

In Saskatchewan, an area equally blessed with resources of a different kind — fossil fuels — the province hasn’t needed to look for alternatives until recently, Kirsten Marcia of Deep Earth Energy Production Corp. (DEEP) said. DEEP is a Saskatchewan-based company exploring the possibility of developing a geothermal power plant in southeast Saskatchewan.

“I am feeling very optimistic SaskPower will consider a power-purchase agreement when the time is right,” Marcia said.

2. Upfront cost and risk is high

Geothermal may be competitive over the 30-year lifespan of a plant, but it is risky, comes with high upfront capital costs and a slow payoff at the end, making investors wary.

The exploratory drilling for geothermal is as complex and uncertain as oil and gas drilling, but the resource at the end doesn’t return the level of energy density as a fossil fuel play, Jacek Majorowicz, a University of Alberta professor of physics, said.

“We can’t completely define the resource until we are drilling, so the project has front-end risk with long-term return,” Dunn, of Borealis, said. “You have to have a good geologist and a better banker.”

3. Limited government interest and support

As the fossil fuel industry gets $25 billion in subsidies each year and other alternatives have started to get support, the geothermal industry has been virtually frozen out of government support in developing the industry, CanGEA says. The organization formed in 2007 and is small, but recently crowd-funded over $50,000 to hire a policy advisor to work on removing the barriers to developing the industry.

Oil and gas regions are fertile ground for geothermal operations because a lot of the risky and uncertain exploratory drilling is already done by the fossil fuel industry. Marcia with DEEP says Saskatchewan is open to geothermal exploration of its oil and gas regions, but B.C. is not, Dunn says.

“I can’t get a geothermal lease in an oil and gas development in B.C,” says Dunn.

When the Ontario released its feed-in tariff program for alternative energy, allowing producers to sell their energy back into the grid, geothermal was left off the list.

4. Chicken or egg problem

With no commercial geothermal power plant, arguably Canada has no geothermal power plant industry, making their voice easily dismissed when decision makers are developing energy plans.

“We are going to have a lot easier time improving policy and achieving regulatory change when we are relevant, and one of the fastest ways to be relevant is to have active working projects,” Dunn says.

“You can’t do anything until you have a few pilot projects and you learn from them; it can’t all be theoretical,” says Majorowicz, who has published a number of papers on Canada’s geothermal potential, including co-authoring a recent study demonstrating geothermal is competitive with cheap natural gas for heating systems in Alberta.

5. No price on carbon

As a relatively clean energy source releasing a limited amount of greenhouse gases, developing geothermal energy resources would make more economic sense if Canada increased the cost to dump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

“We do all of our economic modeling with no price on carbon, because it has been so unstable for so long – most finance guys we deal with won’t accept it,” Dunn says.

With a carbon price, geothermal “goes from being profitable to being very profitable,” Dunn says.

With a viable carbon tax, oil and gas companies looking for alternatives to drilling for fossil fuels would quickly turn to geothermal. “It would be a saviour” because they have the necessary drilling experience to get the job done, Majorowicz says.

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This is the second installment of a two-part series on carbon capture and storage. Read Part 1, Alberta's Carbon Capture and Storage Plan Stagnate as Carbon Price Lags.

As Alberta falls behind on its goal to capture 30 million tonnes of carbon emissions a year by 2020, hundreds of millions of dollars in government subsidies are being pumped into the carbon capture and storage (CCS) sector.

Enhance Energy’s Alberta Carbon Trunk Line project is receiving $495 million from Alberta and $63.3 million from Ottawa. Enhance says on its website the project would have been much smaller without the government investment.

Shell Canada, with partners Chevron Canada Ltd. and Marathon Oil Corp., is developing Alberta’s only other CCS project, called Quest, with $120 million in federal and $745 million in provincial support. Shell aims to sequester more than one million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year from its Scotford upgrader, starting in late 2015.

Shell told Postmedia it paid $400 million in taxes and royalties in 2012 and the project is requiring the company to share its expertise with other companies.

As part of the agreement for funding Alberta’s two CCS projects, the knowledge gained from developing the projects is being shared with the CCS community at large, says Mike Fernandez, executive director of sustainable energy at Alberta Energy.[view:in_this_series=block_1]

In Saskatchewan, SaskPower hoped to start its $1.3-billion CCS project to capture one million tonnes of carbon dioxide by April 2014, said Tyler Hopson, a SaskPower spokesperson. Although recent delays have postponed the project coming on line.

With $240 million from the federal government and the rest of start-up funding coming from SaskPower, the Crown corporation will use the carbon dioxide from its coal-fired plant at Boundary Bay for enhanced oil recovery operations. SaskPower is also building a $60-million facility to provide firms with space to test their capture technologies.

Even with major government support, projects are not guaranteed.

Cancelled CCS projects

TransAlta Corp. announced in 2012 it was abandoning its CCS project connected to its new Keephills 3 coal-fired plant. Despite $342 million from Ottawa and $436 million in funding from Alberta, TransAlta cancelled the project because “the market for CO2 sales and the value of emissions reductions in Alberta and Canada are not sufficient,” according to the project’s final report.

The project would have accounted for about 20 per cent of Alberta’s total carbon dioxide emissions reduction target by 2015. Instead, the company decided to pay the $15-per-tonne penalty for carbon over a certain level.

“What’s really needed, of course, is a regulatory framework on CO2 that puts a value on that CO2. A significant value,” Don Wharton, vice-president of policy and sustainability at TransAlta, told the Globe and Mail.

 “The federal government came out with coal regulations that basically allow all their [TransAlta’s] plants to continue to emit at their current level until the end of their economic life,” Severson-Baker says. “In the meantime, the Alberta government hasn’t followed through with its plan to increase the amount of money it charges on a per-tonne basis for large emitters and it has remained at $15-a-tonne for the last five years.”

With no stronger carbon regulations in sight, fossil fuel companies drop projects to reduce or sequester carbon.

The other cancellation occurred in early 2013. Swan Hills Synfuels deferred building its Synfuels LP gas plant to turn underground coal into synthetic natural gas because of low natural gas prices. As a result, Alberta backed away from providing $285 million in subsidies to help build the carbon capture technology.

“CCS investment is the same as a refinery or power plant, it is a very capital-intensive investment where you need that guaranteed revenue stream over time, so it is not just a question of what the carbon price is today, it’s, ‘Can I lock in that carbon price over the long-term?’ ” said Andrew Leach, energy economist from the University of Alberta.

No GHG Regulations and No New Funding Plans

In a year-end interview, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said federal greenhouse gas regulations for the oil and gas industry are delayed again. Harper said the regulations would have to wait until they can be harmonized with the United States.

With weak coal regulations and no new oil and gas regulations to boost the cost of pumping unabated atmosphere-heating gases, there are also no new funding plans for new CCS projects coming down the pipeline in Alberta.

“There are no plans; no new funding plans for a big CCS funding program,” Fernandez at Alberta Energy said.

A carbon tax would allow companies to make their own decisions, Severson-Baker says, whereas direct funding for CCS puts government in the role of choosing technologies.

Alberta Would Need 25 Quest Projects

According to Alberta’s 2009 climate plan, the province aims to capture 30 million tonnes of carbon emissions annually by 2020. If all goes well, Shell Canada’s Quest and Enhance Energy’s Alberta Carbon Trunk Line will only be sequestering roughly three to four million tonnes by 2020.

In 2012, Simon Dyer, policy director at the Pembina Institute, did the math for the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce:

Alberta’s climate plan states that 30 MT of annual reductions will be derived by CCS by 2020 — the equivalent of building 25 Quest-type projects in the next 8 years. Clearly, this is a fiction.

When Alberta projects to 2050, the province aims to capture and store 139 million tonnes of emissions.

“When I look out to 2050, yes we acknowledge it is an aggressive target and we are going to need to see commercial CCS at dozens of sites, possibly at a hundred sites,” Fernandez said. “I am pretty confident as the price of carbon starts to rise in North America, the cost of this technology will come down and it is very realistic to hit our 2050 CCS targets.”

In mid-December, a Vancouver-area start-up Inventys Thermal Technologies announced former U.S. energy secretary Steven Chu was joining its board. In the announcement, Inventys’ president said its new technology could cut capital and operating expenses to less than a fifth of current processes, reported the Globe and Mail.

As the CCS technology matures, the cost to sequester will drop, but the speed and decrease needed to make CCS a commercial solution can only be achieved via a price on carbon, Severson-Baker says. 

Will the carbon stay put underground?

If the technology became practical and Alberta was somehow sequestering 139 million tonnes of emissions per year by 2050, research has shed light on concerns this could cause earthquakes and ultimately release the trapped carbon dioxide.

A 2012 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Mark Zoback and Steven Gorelick of Stanford University reveal there is a “high probability” injecting large amounts of carbon dioxide into brittle rocks will trigger earthquakes and even small quakes could break the seal of the carbon repository.

The authors concluded, “large-scale CCS is a risky, and likely unsuccessful, strategy for significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”

With the carbon needing to be stored underground forever, will the oil companies of today be around in a hundred years to monitor their oceans of carbon dioxide sitting under the surface?

Read part 1, here.

Image Credit: Pembina Institute via Flickr

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This is the first installment of a two-part series on carbon capture and storage. Read Part 2, Government Subsidies Keep Alberta's CCS Dream Afloat.

Alberta is falling behind on its goal to capture 30 million tonnes of carbon emissions a year by 2020 — and growth in the carbon capture and storage (CCS) industry will only come if the price of carbon rises significantly or government mandates CCS through regulation, experts and officials say.  

Currently, only two CCS projects are in the works in Alberta. If both projects come on line in time they will sequester at best three or four million tonnes of carbon a year by 2020 — just a tenth of the province’s target.

Enhance Energy Inc. is moving ahead this spring with building its Alberta Carbon Trunk Line, which the company calls the world’s largest carbon capture and storage project.

The carbon trunk line will include a 240-kilometre pipeline to capture waste carbon from Alberta’s industrial heartland and pipe it south to the Lacombe area, where it will be injected into depleted oil reservoirs to help extract light oil, before being stored underground.

Enhance Energy aims to have its project up and running by the end of 2015, president and CEO Susan Cole told DeSmog Canada. Initially, the plan was to sequester carbon emissions from North West Upgrading Inc.’s bitumen refinery, but with that project delayed until after 2017, the company had to find two new sources of carbon dioxide. Cole is optimistic Enhance will meet its goal of sequestering 1.8 million tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2017.[view:in_this_series=block_1]

Despite Enhance Energy’s progress, ambitious plans of using carbon capture and storage to sequester carbon emissions on a grand scale are not thriving in Canada. In the last two years, the number of CCS projects in Canada dropped from five to three (two in Alberta and one in Saskatchewan).

And if CCS does take off, questions remain about the cost of the greenhouse gas reduction strategy and the long-term liability of vast amounts of carbon stored underground indefinitely. In this two-part DeSmog Canada series, we explore these questions in detail.

How CCS works

Carbon capture and storage builds upon technologies used for pumping liquefied carbon dioxide into depleted oil wells to extract hard-to-get reserves. Besides being used for extracting oil, waste carbon dioxide can also be stored underground in saline rock formations or turned into new products.

There are currently no commercial-level projects in Canada to turn waste carbon into products, but some test projects are underway. The National Research Council invested $8 million in building a demonstration facility at Canadian Natural’s Primrose South oilsands facility to turn waste carbon into algae and then process it into biofuels.

The standard CCS model collects waste carbon dioxide from industrial facilities and compresses it into a dense fuel to transport via pipeline to a storage location. The storage site is usually one to two kilometres underground in a porous, saline-rock formation, below a “caprock” such as a shale or rock salt layer required to keep the carbon dioxide in place. Monitoring stations are installed at the groundwater level, the storage location and at the injection site.

Alberta and Saskatchewan sit upon a geological formation that could sequester around 3.7 trillion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions. Parts of British Columbia, Manitoba and Newfoundland could also be used to sequester carbon dioxide, while Ontario and Quebec have limited potential for storing carbon emissions underground.

CCS cartoon from the University of Bristol's CO2 Group.

The cost of burying carbon underground

Building facilities to capture, pipe and store carbon dioxide is expensive. The cost to sequester carbon dioxide from an upgrader in Canada is between $70 and $90 per tonne. With fewer upgraders being built in Canada, the needed growth of CCS technology is likely to be at in-situ oilsands operations, where the cost jumps significantly to $160 to $250 per tonne.

If the waste carbon is used for enhanced oil recovery operations, it offsets costs by $20 to $50 a tonne. The expensive and complicated process of securing waste carbon makes extracting carbon dioxide for enhanced oil recovery operations more economical, says Chris Severson-Baker, managing director of the Pembina Institute, a sustainable energy think tank.

“It is very complicated to broker an agreement between a company generating CO2 and one that will use it,” Severson-Baker says. “An oil and gas company that wants to use CO2 for [enhanced oil recovery] can drill their own CO2 well and have complete control over it and they don’t pay an environmental charge for the CO2 that ends up in the atmosphere.”

As a method to cut greenhouse gas emissions CCS is expensive, but many view it as a key transition technology to move us from our business-as-usual economy to a de-carbonized system. But as the economics stand now, it won’t happen on its own.

“You need something that underpins it [CCS] — either it is regulation the firm needs to meet so they are prepared to spend the money on carbon capture and storage, or you need the carbon price high enough to make it viable,” Andrew Leach, energy economist at the University of Alberta, says.

The Pembina Institute says on its website CCS should be viewed as “one of a number of potentially effective technologies for reducing GHG emissions on the scale required to combat catastrophic climate change.” However, the institute adds CCS needs to be seen as part of a portfolio of solutions and adequate attention must be paid to “more sustainable, low-impact solutions such as ramping up on renewable energy and energy efficiency.”

On the other hand, Greenpeace says CCS technology is too expensive and too late to solve the climate crisis and the money is better spent on renewable energy and efficiency.

Indeed, the three remaining CCS projects in Canada are only moving forward because of massive government support.

Read Part 2: Government Subsidies Keep Alberta's CCS Dream Afloat

Image Credit: Pembina Insititute via Flickr

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