“It’s not at all realistic,” said Julia Levin, senior program manager at Environmental Defence and author of the report.
“They have said publicly on multiple occasions ‘it’s not part of our 2030 toolkit,’ and they’ve now released a plan that says the opposite,” said Levin.
CCUS involves trapping carbon dioxide released during industrial processes to prevent it from being emitted into the atmosphere, where it contributes to global warming.
This is the case with 70 per cent of captured carbon in Canada, resulting in increased oil production, the report says.
Shell’s Alberta-based Quest CCUS project has a capture rate of 80 per cent, but a recent report by Global Witness found the facility — which produces blue hydrogen — actually emits more carbon than it captures.
This is because Canada’s hydrogen strategy centres on blue hydrogen, which is produced from natural gas with carbon capture, as opposed to green hydrogen, which is made with renewable electricity, or grey hydrogen, which is made from natural gas with no carbon capture.
“Then, oil and gas companies can figure out how to reach that target.
“At a time when the oil and gas industry is flush with cash, if they want to take bets that they can meet their mission targets with CCS, let them pay for it,”.
Carbon capture may form a part of our future mitigation efforts…..since the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is already dangerously high…..and given its long shelf life……needs to be reduced in the short term to prevent the positive feedback loops of continued global warming from moving us to a place we can’t retreat from.
The science isn’t difficult, its unforgiving.
Right up there with the fantasy of filling the earth with small nuclear reactors, all of which produce radioactive waste with half life’s over 200o years.
Let’s do what we can to see none of our public money goes into these black money pits….they represent a continuation of the problem, and aren’t any part of the solution.
They managed to live on this land for well over 12,000 years…without destroying land and water….perhaps they could set up some schools to take the exploiter out of us, and teach us respect for all our brothers and sisters.
On another recent NO piece I tried to work out some of the costs of CCUS, given that cars and trucks alone emit 140,000,000 tonnes of CO2 annually .
And, as usual, not a peep about the hundreds of millions of tonnes CO2 that can be captured and sequestered every year by large-scale regenerative agriculture and forestry, with much better yields and lower operating costs.