Saskatchewan has developed a bit of a negative reputation on the environmental front lately.

Guess that’s what happens when a premier threatens to sue the federal government over mandated carbon pricing and instead promotes the extremely expensive technology of carbon capture and storage.

That’s why it came as quite a surprise when provincial electricity utility SaskPower announced in mid-May that it had signed a power purchase agreement (PPA) — a contract for guaranteed sales at a fixed price — with geothermal company Deep Earth Energy Production.

The project in Williston Basin is an extremely small one: at five megawatts (MW), it will represent only 0.1 per cent of the province’s current electricity capacity. But it will be the first geothermal power project in Canada and experts say that it’s a huge step forward for geothermal, not only for Saskatchewan but the entire country.

“Saskatchewan is very quiet and all of a sudden boom, they make an announcement,” says Alison Thompson, chair and co-founder of the Canadian Geothermal Energy Association (CanGEA), in an interview with DeSmog Canada. “This is a little bit unexpected, but of course very, very positive. It has to start somewhere.”

“We don’t have any geothermal power generation in Canada yet,” adds Kirsten Marcia, president and CEO of Deep Earth Energy Production, also known as DEEP. “A successful project like DEEP will really help bolster other projects in other provinces to move ahead and get a little more traction.”

There’s also plenty of opportunity for retraining oil and gas workers for geothermal projects, including in manufacturing components, performing electrical work and operating rigs. In 2014, it was calculated by CanGEA that while the controversial Site C Dam in northeastern B.C. would only generate 150 permanent jobs, the same amount of power produced by geothermal would result in 2,000.

Saskatchewan Did What?! Province OKs Canada’s First #Geothermal Power Plant https://t.co/cf6kY2lrkb #SaskPower #cdnpoli #renewableenergy

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) June 7, 2017

A downturn in oil and gas production in Alberta has also left a highly skilled drilling workforce without jobs. The geothermal industry has argued the province’s abandoned oil and gas wells present an opportunity to potentially put thousands of drillers back to work.

Recent Changes to Federal Tax Code Helped Push Project Forward

It’s anticipated that drilling for the project will commence later this year, but DEEP has been attempting to build this project for many years.

Initially, it was expected that power production would begin in 2013.

But Marcia says in an interview that it encountered problems in funding the project, resulting in delays. In 2014, a $2 million pre-feasibility study that was co-funded by Natural Resources Canada and SaskPower concluded that 2017 was a viable operational date for the project if studies and tests were completed in a timely manner.

Thompson — who also serves as a principal of Borealis GeoPower —  points to the federal government’s recent change to the tax code to recognize geothermal heat as renewable energy, which allows for flow-through share capabilities, as a key reason for why the project could finally move forward.

“The province wants to know that the developer is actually going to spend their money and develop,” she says. “By having the mechanism available to raise financing for a project and drill wells, that signals to the province that if they provided the PPA, the private sector could do their part and go ahead and get financing.”

Aquifer Could Support 20 Small Geothermal Plants

Thompson says that in the “volcanic section of the world” — which includes the likes of Iceland, New Zealand and California — it’s not unusual to have a geothermal plant with capacity to generate 200 megawatts of electricity.

That’s simply not possible in most of Canada. Instead, geothermal companies wishing to generate electricity from heat will have to drill over three kilometres into the earth to reach the resource in the range of 120 degrees Celsius, constructing a series of small plants within the same region.

Marcia notes that most geothermal gradings are about 30 degrees Celsius per kilometre. At this location — right along the United States border, near Estevan — it’s about 40 degrees Celsius per kilometre.

In other words, it’s an ideal spot.

According to DEEP, the Williston Basin Hot Sedimentary Aquifer could support 200 megawatts worth of capacity from more than 20 plants.

The current estimate for the first five megawatt plant is around $40 million in capital costs, or about $8 million per megawatt of new installed capacity. For context, British Columbia’s proposed Site C Dam would add 1,100 megawatts for $9 billion, or about $8.2 million per megawatt of installed capacity.

However, Marcia notes that she anticipates the federal government will fund about half of the project, bringing down capital costs significantly. It’s also expected that economies of scale in later projects would result in capital cost savings of 10 per cent.

In addition, DEEP plans to sell the wastewater before reinjecting it back into the earth. Marcia says the most obvious client would be a greenhouse developer, with the wastewater discounted to the price of readily available natural gas and coming with carbon credits for the developer.

“There’s a huge business case for our wastewater,” she explains. “The water that comes out of the plant is still 65 degrees Celsius, so it’s extremely hot still. We’ve done some modelling on what we can do with that: as it turns out, from just one of our plants, we could heat a 45 acre greenhouse.”

In an interview with a Saskatchewan radio station, Marcia suggested that heat could help grow a variety of products, including legal marijuana.

Province Still Plans to Expand Fossil Fuel Power In Future Years

This is all taking place within the context of Saskatchewan’s commitment to have 50 per cent of generating capacity from renewable sources by 2030.

Saskatchewan’s grid currently has 4,437 megawatts of capacity. The plan is to increase that to 7,000 megawatts by 2030, meaning that 3,500 megawatts of capacity will have to come from renewables if the government sticks with its commitment.

“Obviously, five megawatts isn’t a lot when they’re looking at possibly a 7,000 megawatt grid by 2030,” says Mark Bigland-Pritchard, energy consultant and co-author of the report SaskPower’s Carbon Capture Project: What Risk? What Reward? “By itself, it’s insignificant. If they can do a whole lot of them as they are saying, then it’s another contributor.”

Most of the growth in renewables to 2030 will come from new wind power, via a controversial procurement process that only allows for utility-scale producers to bid (effectively disqualifying the community-scale wind projects). Solar projects are expected to add another 60 megawatts, an arguably small amount given the province is one of the sunniest places in North America.

Bigland-Pritchard notes that Saskatchewan’s plan completely disregards the “low-hanging fruit in climate policy” of conservation, and includes a further buildout of fossil fuel powered electricity. In addition, Saskatchewan is the only province that relies on coal-fired power that hasn’t announced a roadmap to phasing out the high-polluting source.

Despite that, he suggests there is potential for geothermal projects in Saskatchewan, especially if DEEP manages to get its first pilot plant working in two years or so.

“If — and it’s an enormous ‘if’ — they can make this geothermal system work in the first one to five units, then they could easily get enough to replace at least one coal unit,” he says.

Electric Utilities Must Grant More Permits for Geothermal

Next up for DEEP is the completion of the $8 million bankable feasibility study, which the company has already secured funding for. Marcia says the company will be drilling in the fourth quarter of this year, once final well licensing is completed and depending on rig availability.

Thompson emphasizes that SaskPower will have to give out far more permits to DEEP and other geothermal companies in order to ensure the power source is allowed to expand; she emphasizes that it’s not that companies don’t have the knowledge or technology or even the financing. The hold-up is the permitting process.

She adds there have been no permits given for geothermal in Alberta.

“[SaskPower’s decision] really speaks to not the resource quality, but to their commitment to use all the tools in their toolbox for renewable energy,” she concludes. “And I hope it sends a strong message to British Columbia, who has been very, very slow in giving out electricity purchase agreements to the geothermal industry, even though the resource there is the best in Canada.”

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It would have been the first 100 per cent community-owned renewable power project in North America.

Located just south of Swift Current, Sask., the $90-million project would have generated 35 megawatts (MW) of electricity from wind turbines and solar panels with electricity sold to the provincial utility, SaskPower.

But SaskPower had other plans for the region — specifically, a $700-million natural gas power station.

On Dec. 2, it was announced that the gas power station — which will emit one million tonnes of greenhouse gases annually, equivalent to putting 211,000 cars on the road for a year — wouldn’t require a federal environmental assessment.

Two days later, SaskWind, the provincial wind energy association and key promoter of the proposed Swift Current wind and solar project, shut down after four years of operation.

In a final blog post, SaskWind president James Glennie wrote that the decision about the environmental assessment of the natural gas power station was “extremely disappointing, includes no justification and verges on the inexplicable.”

The gas-fired power plant is proposed to open in 2019 just northwest of Swift Current and generate 350 MW, ten times more electricity than the renewable project.

The Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency’s decision not to review the gas power station was the final straw for SaskWind, Glennie told DeSmog Canada in an interview.

Many other factors added up to “stonewall” his organization’s push for community-owned wind power, despite the fact that Saskatchewan has an excellent wind resource.

SaskPower and the provincial government “refused to acknowledge our existence in four years,” Glennie said.

“We couldn’t have a debate or discussion with them.”

The story of SaskWind’s failed push for community-led renewable energy is about much more than one lost wind project — it’s about how better, cheaper, more sustainable and more democratic energy choices are pushed aside to maintain the status quo.

It’s a problem that’s plagued many of Canada’s provinces, like B.C. where a primary focus on hydroelectric development has forced out wind and solar power producers, or Ontario where large-scale nuclear and hydro kept small-scale and community-led energy production at bay for years.

Saskatchewan’s community-led wind projects could help the province break the spell, but first they’d have to be given the chance.

SaskPower’s Fossil Fuel Tunnel Vision

Glennie’s dream of a community-owned wind project in Saskatchewan seemed like a win-win-win. Job creation, emissions reductions and provincial profit retention are among the many benefits SaskWind outlines on its website.

But the province put up two big barriers, according to Glennie.  

First, SaskPower has historically prioritized fossil fuel projects. Second, the province prioritizes utility-scale energy production (around 50 MW or larger) to the exclusion of smaller, community-led initiatives.

In 2015, 42 per cent of Saskatchewan’s power came from coal-fired power plants and 34 per cent from natural gas. Only 2.9 per cent was generated by wind.

Rather than switching to less polluting forms of energy, the province has focused heavily on the controversial technique of carbon capture and storage (CCS) and building new natural gas power plants.

Boundary Dam CCS Doubled Cost of Power, Plagued With Design Flaws

Carbon capture and storage is a process which captures carbon emissions primarily from coal-fired power plants for sequestration underground or to be used in oil and gas recovery. But the technology, which is costly, hasn’t been able to achieve the full-scale commercial success industry hoped.

In recent years 43 CCS projects worldwide have been cancelled, put on hold or simply gone dormant.

SaskPower’s carbon capture and storage project at the Boundary Dam coal power plant, which the province promised would provide “clean” coal-powered electricity, cost nearly $1.5 billion to build, effectively doubling the cost of power from $0.06 per kilowatt hour (kWh) to $0.12 per kWh from the facility.

SaskPower has since received multiple approvals for rate increases from the provincial government.

“It’s certainly not competitive with wind,” says Mark Bigland-Pritchard, co-author of the report SaskPower's Carbon Capture Project What Risk? What Reward?

“Just coal by itself is only barely competitive with wind given the wind speeds and capacity factors that we can achieve in Saskatchewan.”

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), the levelised cost of new generation capacity for coal with CCS is $139.50 per megawatt hour. Natural gas costs $55.80 per megawatt hour, but doesn’t include any price on carbon.

Meanwhile, wind power costs $58.50 per megawatt hour, or about 42 per cent of the price of coal with CCS.

Brett Dolter, vice-president at the Canadian Society for Ecological Economics, says carbon capture on coal is “one of the priciest ways to meet emissions reductions” and that it would be far more prudent to increase wind capacity and use gas and hydro as backup.

“If we look at a more Canadian perspective, it might make sense for Saskatchewan to even overbuild wind and export it to Alberta to help them get off of coal,” he says. “It’s such a great wind resource and right next-door.”

How #Saskatchewan is Driving Small Wind Producers Out of the Market https://t.co/NF4JZAZ3vl @james_m_wilt #skpoli #cdnpoli #renewables

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) January 5, 2017

SaskPower Only Seeking Utility-Scale Renewables in RFP Process

This is where the second source of “stonewalling” community-owned wind power comes in.

Saskatchewan has set a target of 50 per cent generation capacity from renewables by 2030, requiring an increase of wind power from five per cent of capacity to 30 per cent.

Robert Hornung — president of the Canadian Wind Energy Association (CanWEA) — says Saskatchewan plans to procure about 1,600 MW of wind between now and 2030, which represents a “very significant and important short-term growth opportunity for the industry.”

(That’s in contrast to British Columbia, which CanWEA pulled out of in February because the provincial government’s decision to proceed with the Site C dam and other hydroelectric projects has effectively “crowded out the need for other forms of generation” until 2030.)

SaskPower is explicitly looking for utility-scale wind projects, mostly between 100 and 200 MW.

In a statement provided to DeSmog Canada, a SaskPower spokesperson said: “We do not have any specific plans for community wind projects and we are asking community projects to submit to the request for qualification, the same as all other proponents.”

But a minimum requirement of the request for qualification (RFQ) process — which will start in the first quarter of 2017 — is “experience in utility scale wind projects.”

That clearly discounts organizations like SaskWind.

“By definition there are none in the province that [qualify],” Glennie says.

A report by Adrienne Baker of Canadian Clean Energy Conferences noted this process could result in "many developers competing for a relatively small number of contracts,” with the implication being that resulting contracts would be for large megawatt wind farms, rather than community-scale projects.

Procuring wind with big request for proposal (RFP) tender processes has indeed worked; Hornung notes there’s been 10,000 MW of wind installed across the country in the last decade.

That’s come mostly from utility-scale wind farms owned by the likes of EDF Énergies Nouvelles, Capital Power, TransAlta and Brookfield Renewable Power. Nova Scotia did see significant success with its feed-in tariff for community-owned renewables (which was recently cancelled by the provincial Liberals).

“The procurement processes that we have in Canada that tend to focus very much on securing the lowest-cost power does tend to favour in a relative sense the utility-scale projects because they can capture some economies of scale that community-scale projects can’t,” Hornung said.

A 177 MW utility-scale wind project recently on the table in southwestern Saskatchewan was projected to cost $355 million, or one MW for every $2 million in capital costs. That’s a cheaper relative investment compared to the proposed 30 MW Swift Current project, at $90 million, or one MW for every $3 million in upfront investment.

Community-Owned Wind Generates More Local Support and Jobs

Yet there can be significant downsides to a top-down approach that can push community-level concerns to the wayside.

For one, it doesn’t generate as many local jobs; a 2014 report by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance indicated that community-owned wind projects create an average of twice as many jobs as "absentee-owned wind projects."

Because of this, there is some tension between large-scale wind energy producers represented by CanWEA, which include major players like TransAlta, Brookfield and Enbridge, and community wind energy advocates like SaskWind.

For Glennie, not having that community component can be detrimental to wind energy projects, something Ontario has experienced over the last decade.

There are now dozens of anti-wind organizations in Ontario, which boasts 3,923 MW in generation capacity from wind.

In late September, Ontario scrapped $3.8 billion of planned renewable procurements amid severe anti-wind backlash. Only two weeks later, a NAFTA tribunal awarded $28 million to Windstream Energy LLC after Ontario deferred plans for offshore wind development in 2011.

“Ontario doesn’t exactly have a stunning reputation of doing wind and solar,” he says. “It’s like ‘right, where we can screw up next? Let’s try Saskatchewan.’ ”

As Chris Turner noted in a 2015 article for The Walrus, Ontario’s Green Energy Act has been made "effectively defunct" and the key feed-in tariff gone.

Turner argued that much of the failure of the province’s Green Energy Act has to do with the institutional culture of massive Crown corporations, which tended to focus on large-scale nuclear and hydro projects at the expense of decentralized renewables.

Apparently the same type of “fiefdom,” as Turner calls it, is present in Saskatchewan.

“SaskPower is still built on that old sort of command-and-control approach that so many utilities have,” Bigland-Pritchard says.

There is already indication that some of the mistakes made with wind energy in Ontario could be repeated in Saskatchewan. In mid-September, an Ontario-based wind company planning to build the aforementioned 177 MW wind farm in southwestern Saskatchewan was rebuffed by local environmentalists concerned about impacts on migratory birds.

SaskPower plans to relocate the project.

Community Ownership as a Social Acceptance Strategy

It may be a sign of things to come.

“I don’t understand what the thinking was in SaskPower’s mind when they rejected [community-owned projects],” says Cathy Sproule, NDP opposition critic for the environment and SaskPower.

“It’s unfortunate. I like the idea of allowing communities to engage in this process, and I think you get better buy-in when wind projects go up.”

A SaskPower spokesperson notes that 20 MW of solar will be added to the grid by 2021 via community-based projects, with another 20 MW from First Nations communities.

That’s a practical objective: southeast Saskatchewan, where many of the coal-fired power plants are located, is one of the sunniest places in Canada, making it an excellent spot for solar.

But electricity demand in Saskatchewan peaks in the winter, and solar output is lowest then because of fewer hours of sunlight. Conversely, wind speeds are highest in the winter.

As Dolter notes: “Wind aligns better with the demand profile than solar.”

“Community ownership might be almost more of a social acceptance strategy than an economic strategy,” Dolter says.

“If you’ve got a rural municipality in Saskatchewan who has an ownership stake in wind, that municipality might be a lot happier with it than they are in Ontario where the ability for municipalities to say ‘no’ to wind projects was removed.”

Image: A wind energy worker services a turbine in Colorado. Photo: Dennis Schroder/National Renewable Energy Laboratory

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Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall has repeatedly argued that putting a price on carbon would be bad for the economy — but experts say Wall’s own climate change strategy will end up costing the province more per tonne than the federal government’s plan, while failing to be nearly as fair or effective as a carbon tax.   

Much of Saskatchewan’s climate strategy centres around the SaskPower Boundary Dam carbon capture and storage (CCS) project, which cost $1.5 billion to build (funded mostly by SaskPower ratepayers and a $240 million investment from the federal government).

“When we think about how we can reduce emissions most cost-effectively, [Boundary Dam] probably stands out as an example of how not to do it,” says Dan Woynillowicz, policy director at Clean Energy Canada.

Choosing a preferential technology and using public dollars to subsidize it is “quite inconsistent with the approach that most conservative politicians and economists would take,” Woynillowicz added.

Indeed, even as oil companies and conservative politicians — such as Preston Manning, Jean Charest and Jim Dinning — have spoken in favour of putting a price on carbon, Wall has worked hard to establish himself as the major voice of opposition to a federal carbon tax.

Enter Saskatchewan’s 53-page “Climate Change White Paper,” released on October 18. Carbon nerds eagerly jumped into the paper head first, anxious to learn how Canada’s highest greenhouse gas emitter per capita planned to help Canada meet its climate commitments.  

Disappointingly, the paper essentially packaged up the policy actions Saskatchewan has already taken to date.

Off the Wall: #Saskatchewan @PremierBradWall's Bizarre, Contradictory #ClimatePlan https://t.co/sWJXdJzEFd #cdnpoli #skpoli #carbontax

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) October 25, 2016

Carbon Capture and Storage Far More Expensive Than Carbon Tax

The Boundary Dam CCS project is intended to reduce emissions from SaskPower’s largest coal-fired power plant by capturing smokestack emissions (in the range of one million tonnes of carbon per year).

However, because one-third of those captured emissions will be sold for use in oil extraction at Cenovus’ Weyburn site, the current estimate is that Boundary Dam will remove more like 600,000 tonnes per year from the atmosphere — if it can even manage that.

With that level of emissions recovery, the cost of CCS works out to about $100 or $110 per tonne, according to Trevor Tombe, assistant professor of economics at the University of Calgary.

Only four days prior to the release of Saskatchewan's plan, on the same day as Wall argued in the Globe and Mail that “carbon-capture technology works,” a report in Science concluded that negative-emission technologies such as carbon capture storage are an “unjust and high-stakes gamble” that “should not form the basis of the mitigation agenda.”

One of the reasons carbon pricing has attracted support from across the political spectrum is because it doesn’t pick winners and losers. It puts a price on pollution and then lets the market determine the best ways to reduce carbon emissions. The bizarre thing is that Saskatchewan’s gamble on CCS is the exact opposite of that.

Woynillowicz adds there’s little evidence that SaskPower has developed any plans for monetizing their experience and technology to sell it to other jurisdictions, or securing investments from the federal government for future projects.

The One New Thing In Saskatchewan’s Climate White Paper

The only major new announcement in those riveting 53 pages was the call to redeploy $2.65 billion in foreign aid to technology subsidies within Canada.

Tombe says that recommendation mixes two separate conversations —there’s no need to tie a case for additional government investment in research with foreign aid funding.

Experts Suggest Carbon Tax Required to Spark Investments in Renewables

A more consistent approach would be the establishment of a broad-based carbon price.

Such a mechanism — which will take the form of either a $50/tonne carbon tax or cap-and-trade system by 2022 due to the recent federal decision — would address the “market failure” of unpriced pollution, something that Tombe pointed out isn’t solved by providing subsidies for R&D.

It would also incentivize investments in renewable power sources, energy efficiency measures and perhaps even carbon capture and storage (although given the current price tag of the technology — between $75 and $100/tonne just for the “capture” part of it — such a carbon price would have to be significantly higher than currently proposed to justify it).

Yet Wall completely rules out the role of taxation: he argues British Columbia’s emissions are rising despite having a carbon tax, even though many acknowledge emissions are rising precisely because Premier Christy Clark has put a freeze on the tax, preventing its increase from $30/tonne since 2012.

In the White Paper, Wall strangely suggested that “we should be focusing our efforts on innovation and adaptation” and that “a carbon tax will harm Saskatchewan.”

But Woynillowicz says suggested innovations like “new crop varieties that are better able to withstand climate change and that effectively fix GHGs to the soil” would be incentivized in part via a price on carbon.

“You need either dollars to do that if it’s going to be the government making those strategic investments in R&D, or you need to send a price signal that creates the incentive for private sector actors to invest in R&D,” Woynillowicz says.

“You can do that through a price on carbon pollution.”

Climate Plan Quietly Recommits to Carbon Tax on Large Emitters Despite Premier’s Apparent Opposition

Even odder is the fact that Saskatchewan’s White Paper includes a commitment to “[move] ahead with plans for a fund supported by a levy on large emitters, with the fund’s expenditures limited to new technologies and innovation to reduce GHGs and not for general revenue” when the resource economy rebounds.

Tombe says that whether or not Wall likes to admit it, the notion of a “levy on large emitters” is indeed a tax, similar to what Alberta implemented with the Specified Gas Emitters Regulation (SGER) in 2007.

“Roughly speaking, that places that Saskatchewan carbon tax on about 50 per cent of what could be subject to a carbon tax,” he says. “It’s roughly the equivalent of half the coverage of Alberta and B.C.”

Carbon pricing can be designed in many different ways; Alberta’s Climate Leadership Plan offers up a recent example of how to insulate low-income residents and “energy-intensive, trade-exposed” sectors from the economically damaging byproducts of a tax.

“That’s more what I’m disappointed with: that [Wall] sets up straw men and then knocks them down on the carbon tax front,” Tombe says.

“It’s fine: if he wants to have more costly action through the CCS or through the large-emitter levy and leave a lot of low-hanging fruit unpicked, that’s something that will be up to the Saskatchewan people to decide.”

Saskatchewan Has ‘Excellent Renewable Resources’  

Woynillowicz says the one bright spot of the White Paper was the re-commitment to double SaskPower’s generation capacity of renewables by 2030, although that announcement was already made in November 2015.

However, he emphasizes it’s a pledge for 50 per cent generation capacity, not actual generation, meaning it’s more in line with Alberta’s target of 30 per cent renewable generation by 2030 (for contrast, Iowa generated 31 per cent of its electricity from wind power in 2015).

Saskatchewan has “really excellent renewable resources,” Woynillowicz says.

As part of its plan, SaskPower intends to develop 1,600 megawatts of power between 2019 and 2030. But as mentioned, such a transition would be greatly accelerated by a commitment to a broad-based carbon price.

“Really, I’m just left scratching my head, wondering why Premier Wall has made this decision to oppose [carbon pricing] so vocally and aggressively,” Woynillowicz concludes.

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A side event at the UNFCCC COP20 climate negotiations in Lima, Peru was disrupted Monday when climate activists and individuals representing communities on the frontlines of energy development flooded the presentation hall and staged a ‘walk out’ on fossil fuels.

The event was hosted by the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA) and the Global CCS Institute and featured Lord Nicholas Stern and David Hone, Shell’s chief climate advisor, as speakers.

The talk, originally entitled “Why Divest from Fossil Fuels When a Future with Low Emission Fossil Fuel Energy Use is Already a Reality?,” was inexplicably renamed “How Can we Reconcile Climate Targets with Energy Demand Growth” and focused on the use of carbon capture and storage (CCS) as a technological solution to carbon emissions that cause global warming.

A citizen group formed outside the venue holding a banner that read “get fossil fuels out of COP” and used the acronym CCS to spell out “Corporate Capture ≠ Solution.”

Civil society groups gather outside a fossil fuel sponsored event discussing carbon capture and storage. Photo by Carol Linnitt.

The protest was designed to “defend our rights from these companies and corporations that are attacking our people,” Ana Maytik Avirama, from the Corporate Europe Observatory Foundation, told a crowd gathered outside the presentation pavilion.

“We need to keep the fossil fuel lobby out of these negotiations, out of our governments and out of the decisions that are trying to protect our livelihoods and our lives,” she said.

Godwin Uyi Ojo, executive director of environmental rights action in Nigeria attended the action to protest Shell’s presence at the climate negotiations.

“Enough is enough,” he said.

Godwin Uyi Ojo speaks to a crowd gathered outside the IETA event. "Leave the oil in the soil, the coal in the hole, the tar sands in the sand," he said. Photo by Carol Linnitt.

“Shell is in that conference promoting dirty energy. They say dirty energy has a place in the future…what you see there is greenwashing. That’s why people are so angry at Shell. We are tired of these antics.”

Bronwen Tucker, a member of the Canadian Youth Delegation said the event, which was sponsored by Shell and Chevron, was designed to discredit grassroots fossil fuel divestment campaigns and tout CCS as a climate solution.

“CCS has been labeled the unicorn of the climate change world because instead of taking emissions out of the atmosphere it would just store them, but it’s an unproven technology that’s prohibitively expensive, much more expensive than renewable energy and other solutions that have been put forward,” she said, adding the event is emblematic of a long-term problem at COP of fossil fuel industry influence in the climate decision-making process.

Bronwen Tucker from the Canadian Youth Delegation told DeSmog CCS is an "unproven technology" that directs investment funds away from renewable energy. Photo by Carol Linnitt.

Lord Nicholas Stern, Chair of the Grantham Research Institute of Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, told DeSmog CCS has the potential to play a huge role in climate action.

“We have to take 50 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent now, globally, down to about zero by the end of this century.”

“We’ve not got many options. And in my view energy efficiency can do the half of it, and the more it does, the better,” Stern said, adding renewables will play a major role as well as some nuclear.

Lord Nicholas Stern discusses CCS with DeSmog Canada. Photo by Carol Linnitt.

“The rest will have to be CCS. That’s all we’ve got. The problem is so big and so important that we’ve got to do all we can.”

He added that CCS removes particulates in dirty emissions coming from sources of energy like oil and, especially, coal.

“The climate emissions we produce now kill people down the track,” Stern said. “Particulates…are killing people now on a major scale. We’ve got to deal with both of them and CCS does both of them.”

According to a report recently put out by the New Carbon Economy, particulate matter from the burning of fossil fuels contributes to both lung and heart disease. According to the World Health Organization particulate pollution plays a substantial role in nearly 4 million premature deaths each year that are attributed to outdoor pollution.

Stern acknowledged there is some uncertainty associated with the technology but he added “you’ve got to pursue all the options because some are going to do better than others and you can’t tell for sure what those are going to be. From the point of view of managing risk, it makes sense to go after more than one [solution].”

Mike Monea, president of the carbon capture and storage initiatives for SaskPower, Saskatchewan’s main power provider, also attended the event to talk about CCS viability in the wake of Boundary Dam, the world’s first coal plant retrofitted with carbon sequestration technology. The project went live in October 2014.

Carbon capture and storage infographic from SaskPower.

Monea argued CCS technology is no longer in question and should play a critical role in the new climate era. And although Monea highlighted the positive climate effects of CCS usage, the position of SaskPower is that CCS “is making a viable technical, environmental and economic case for the continued use of coal.”

Saskatchewan local, Megan Van Buskirk, a member of the Canadian Youth Delegation said the $1.35 billion Boundary Dam project won’t do much at all to address climate change.

“There are lots of issues involved with that project in terms of its reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, for example, SaskPower which is a monopoly in Saskatchewan – which owns that power plant – their emissions are 15 million tonnes per year and that storage facility is only reducing their emissions by 1 million tonnes.”

Van Buskirk adds that SaskPower already has a plan to sell much of that captured carbon to Cenovus Energy for enhanced oil and gas recovery.

“So we see that issue there where we’re touting this as a solution to climate change but really we’re using it to extract more oil and gas which will ultimately mean more greenhouse gas emissions,” she said.

“We really believe this is a false solution to climate change.”

Brad Page, the CEO of the Global CCS Institute, said he feels CCS is a necessity if we’re going to meet global climate targets. He points to the fact that the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) acknowledges CCS will play a role in preventing carbon emissions from entering the atmosphere. 

He added negative public perception is due to a lack of understanding – something industry needs to remedy.

“At a very simple level, CCS puts carbon dioxide back underground where it came from. Many of the people I talk to think CCS is putting carbon into big caverns or something. It’s in fact back into the porous spaces in rocks that the oil and gas originally came from. So it’s actually not a threat.”

Page did not speak to concerns that failed CCS projects could re-release carbon back into the atmosphere.

He added, “I think that environmental groups are really from their heart concerned about continuing the use of fossil fuels and I think many of them want to actually see CCS take off and prove that it can actually be one of those viable technologies.”

Page pointed to Boundary Dam as an example of viable CCS and said there are about four more projects underway in their early construction stages.

“By 2050 though, with the sort of climate targets we’ve got we can’t achieve those emission outcomes without all the technology. Renewables are really important in this, as it energy efficiency. Nuclear is a fairly unloved duckling as well, but it’s going to be needed. And so is CCS.”

“I don’t see that there’s another option here.”

Peter Frumhoff, director of science and policy and chief scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said we’ve “dallied so long on moving toward aggressive emissions reductions that we really need to explore every possible opportunity to constrain emissions below 2 degrees C.”

Frumhoff added efficiency and renewables may not be enough in themselves to limit warming to that 2 degree level.

“Therefore we need to consider other technologies including some that some of us might not love and that may themselves pose some risks. But we’re simply not at a point where we can ignore the much greater climate risks of going above 2 degrees C.”

But for Tucker, the conversation about CCS at the ongoing UNFCCC climate talks should not be dominated by industry.

“It would be the same as having tobacco companies at a conference on lung cancer. There’s a clear conflict. They already have so much sway outside of discussions like this. There’s no room for companies to be holding official UN events."

Jamie Henn from the climate advocacy group 350.org described CCS as a "smokescreen."

"The fossil fuel industry can run from divestment, but they can't hide from the reality that 80 per cent of their reserves need to stay underground. Here in Lima, world leaders are finally talking about targets that are in the realm of what's needed, namely going to zero carbon by 2050. If we're going to meet that goal, we need to start now. If Big Oil wants to research CCS, fine, but that shouldn't distract us from the urgent need to transition away from fossil fuels and towards 100 per cent renewable energy." 

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