We’re a few weeks past what was a roller-coaster of an election in Ontario, ushering the Progressive Conservative party into power and placing the New Democrats as the official opposition, being sworn in this Friday.

The PCs were clear in their campaign: this government will focus on making life more affordable for average rural and urban Ontarians and on creating jobs in the province. These are worthy aspirations, ones that we share, but so far we’re seeing a push for changes that could end up being more costly for Ontarians.

On environment and transportation, the new government will need to realign several of their current plans if they are committed to achieving their goals of making life more affordable and creating jobs.

Cleaning up our air in the lowest-cost way

The new PC government has committed to protecting the environment and coming down heavy on polluters. We agree polluters should pay — this is what carbon pricing does in over 70 jurisdictions across the globe. It’s only fair that operations producing air pollution, including carbon pollution, pay a price or reduce their emissions. The current made-in-Ontario cap-and-trade system is a form of carbon pricing and has been operating successfully since early 2017.

The system ensures lowest-cost pollution reduction, while encouraging business innovation. The dollars collected from polluters have gone into programs to reduce emissions, including to homeowners for retrofits to save on energy bills, to companies for truck retrofits, and are funding infrastructure Ontarians want and need, like transit and cycling infrastructure. There was serious pushback from homeowners who had cost-saving renovations underway when the new government recently cancelled the popular retrofit program.

As one of his first acts after the election, Premier-designate Ford has announced his intention to cancel Ontario’s cap-and-trade system, making his priorities clear. What he hasn’t been clear about are the costs to Ontarians that will certainly result: businesses are wondering how they will be compensated for the credits they’ve already purchased, which will cost the government — and in turn, taxpayers — dearly in payouts, litigation, or both. Western Climate Initiative (WCI), the market that Ontario is a part of, has already closed off the rest of the market to trades from Ontario, meaning businesses that hold credits have no one to sell them to.

The Ontario government has even more to lose by repealing cap-and-trade without proposing an alternative to address carbon pollution. Under this scenario, the federal government will apply their own carbon pricing option (the “backstop”) and decide how to return the money to the province, without input from Ontario. Why throw away a custom-made pricing system designed to address Ontario’s unique competitiveness concerns for an off-the-rack one?

Premier-designate Ford has said that he’ll challenge the federal government’s authority to apply the federal carbon price. This is unlikely to yield a successful outcome. A legal opinion prepared for the Government of Manitoba in 2017 concluded that the federal government has the right to apply the carbon pricing backstop. If the government goes down this road, Ontarians will be on the line for the costs of litigation in the order of $30 million.

Instead of putting resources into fighting the federal government on the backstop, we invite the new government to work with the current cap-and-trade framework while making changes to address any concerns.

Tackling gridlock and providing housing options

It’s clear that Ontarians and businesses in urban regions are looking to their new government to tackle gridlock, as commuting is a growing problem that is keeping workers in their cars and away from their families, and making it harder for businesses to recruit the right people. Transportation is the biggest source of carbon pollution in Ontario and a serious threat to Ontarians’ health. Conditions like cardiovascular disease are caused by the toxic substances that people breathe in when cars and trucks burn gas and diesel in their streets.

In urban areas, there’s no question that transit is the cheaper way to get around. However, frequent and reliable transit in Ontario’s biggest cities isn’t available to enough people yet.

In the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA), the PC’s central idea on transit is to take over responsibility for subway infrastructure from the City of Toronto and add $5 billion in new subway funding. We welcome the recognition that Ontario needs continued transit investment, but it’s important to ask how many people $5 billion in capital funding will serve: subways cost vastly more per kilometre to build than other kinds of transit, take longer to build, and require much higher levels of ridership to be financially viable. The recent 9-km subway extension from Toronto to Vaughan alone cost about $3 billion, so it’s hard to see how a useful network could be built with $5 billion if only spent on subways.

To serve the rest of the region, $600 million from already-secured cap–and-trade revenue (again, funds collected from the biggest polluters) was directly earmarked by the previous government to help deliver and electrify two-way, all-day GO service (and other transit modernizations). GO expansion would give residents of communities like Waterloo Region, Hamilton and Markham the choice to use GO Transit throughout the day. If the new government is committed to cancelling cap-and-trade, it will need to find a way to replace the funds for these improvements.

To support transit viability and increase affordable housing supply, this government should work to accelerate development around transit by removing barriers for projects that fit with existing provincial policy. For example, the province could work with municipalities to speed up the right kind of development around transit and ensure family-friendly units are built. Compared to urban sprawl, which requires costly new roads and sewers, development on under-used land in existing communities reduces the property tax burden on residents across the municipality.

Keeping goods moving and supporting businesses

Goods movement is a backbone of Ontario’s economy, getting products to market and providing the things we need for daily life. Ontario exported nearly $200 billion in goods to the U.S. in 2017, and transportation and warehousing employs 340,000 Ontarians. The volume of goods moving by truck in Ontario is growing swiftly, fuelled by rapid economic and population growth: between 1990 and 2014, road freight activity in Ontario grew by 242 per cent. Trends like online shopping, just-in-time delivery, congestion and technological innovations are changing how and where goods move around. The trucking industry has to adapt to these realities.

Since fuel and maintenance account for about half of operating costs for most fleets, reducing fuel use is very important for business. It’s also important from a pollution perspective, since freight is now the source of just under 10 per cent of Ontario’s carbon pollution, and growing.

Building on the programs that exist to help businesses innovate and become more competitive, the PC government could champion efficient freight. As a first step, they should keep in place the provincial program that currently supports businesses, including family-run trucking companies, to retrofit their fleets to use less fuel (the Green Commercial Vehicles Program). Despite its strong support from the trucking industry, it will be lost unless the cap-and-trade system is kept in place or new funding is allocated. The government should also move forward with plans to establish a Strategic Goods Movement Network for the GTHA and better support municipalities who are leading the way on freight.

The next few months will have a lot of change in store for the province. Ontarians are looking to their new government to continue to safeguard their economic well-being and act with prudence in the best interest of all Ontarians. Early indications mean a course correction is necessary.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

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.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

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

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.