If you follow Canadian climate politics, you might be feeling a sense of déjà vu.
The federal government’s emission reduction plan, required under the Climate Change Accountability Act, is due by March 29 and will provide at least a ballpark estimate or range of expected reductions from the oil and gas sector out to 2030.
But when it comes to delivering pollution reductions from the oil and gas sector, an aggressive push from the oil and gas lobby has the government focused on carrots.
But we are going to need CCUS to reduce emissions from existing oil and gas operations as they wind down, to address emissions from cement, chemicals and steel production, and to store CO2 removed from the atmosphere.
Rewind to the spring of 2019.
It could deliver the CCUS tax credit as planned in the spring federal budget, but withhold eligibility for the oil and gas sector until a policy is complete to cap and cut its pollution, and rigorous criteria are in place to minimize the risk of stranded assets.
Capping and cutting oil and gas pollution, the role of CCUS, and the offer of government support are fundamentally intertwined.
The oilcos are like the “convoy” participants: they have no intention of moving one millimetre beyond what they can get away with.
We are only going to spend so many dollars on the transition to a zero-carbon economy, and even if we were prepared to spend however many dollars it takes, we would still not want to spend more dollars than we need for a given result.
It would be much smarter to spend as much of the money as is feasible on developing and implementing the new technologies at scale, and if initially you can only spend so much money on pilot projects and research so you have money you might have spent on carbon capture left over, you spend that extra money on solar/wind farms or electric car subsidies or any of the thousand other things that need doing.
Capturing upstream operations in oil & gas operations does nothing to reduce the 80–90% of emissions generated from a barrel of oil downstream at the consumer end.
Invest the same scarce resources in public transit, energy efficiency and conservation, building retrofits, smart urban design, and renewables, and we can cut far more emissions.
If CCS is effective, efficient, and economic, let industry pay for it.