With the current provincial government in Alberta, I can’t help but read this request as, “Guaranteed oil lobbyists on proposed sustainable jobs partnership council.”
The provincial emissions reduction plan, released in April, aspires for the province to be carbon neutral by 2050.
It heavily relies on carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) of emissions and export of liquid natural gas to achieve that goal.
Alberta’s emission reduction plan is absolutely bonkers. Carbon capture is 100% bullshit, and the other plank is reducing emissions by increasing natural gas sales. Pure crankery.
How does export of LNG ever lead to carbon neutrality, anyway?
Also, isn’t the primary sales pitch for CCUS that it can help capture emissions from coal/gas power plants at the source of emissions? China’s megaton-scale plants are all used to capture emissions from existing industrial processes, not to filter from the atmosphere.
The efficiency of CC is higher when you’re doing what you’re saying and capturing at the source but it’s still incredibly inefficient and the costs are just astronomical to get it anywhere near a level that would actually make a dent in the emissions. With the current costs today, it would actually be cheaper to tear down a coal power plant and build TWO wind farms that supplied the same amount of energy each than it would be to build CC to capture a fraction of the emissions generated by the coal plant.
And before anyone says that the costs of CC will come down in the future… So will wind farm costs and solar costs, so in the end why build something to reduce emissions when you could build something to completely eliminate them for CHEAPER instead?
Because fossil fuels are flexible to daily variations, easy to scale, geographically-independent, and generally accessible?
It’s useless to overproduce on sunny days if people need electricity in the rain because storage is so obscenely expensive. It’s also challenging to move electricity from areas with high wind (e.g. Xinjiang province in China) to areas with high demand (e.g. Beijing).
So sounds like instead of spending time and money researching carbon capture we should spend it on energy storage which is an already proven technology that, again, aides a 0 carbon energy source instead of making a fossil fuel source less bad