CCS Can't Make the Tar Sands Clean

The governments of Alberta and Canada have championed carbon capture and storage (CCS) as a creative solution to the growing clouds of greenhouse gases from bitumen production in the tar sands.

Bitumen is one of the world’s dirtiest hydrocarbons, producing two to six times more climate changing gases than light oil. So Canadians, the chief exporters of “dirty oil” to the United States, keenly want to start a clean energy dialogue with President Barack Obama. They made their first overture last month when the U.S. president visited Ottawa and agreed to collaborate on developing energy technology, including CCS.

Alberta, home to the tar sands, proposes to clean up its ugly bitumen with the magic of this largely unproven technology. Local politicians now boast that Alberta is the only jurisdiction in the world to have set aside $2 billion of taxpayer’s money to give carbon a proper funeral in a secure cemetery: old oil formations or salt aquifers.

But fools often rush in where Angels fear to tread.

Chasing CCS is a money burner and an energy hog, and it may not deliver much carbon savings. The whole reactive proposition raises extreme security and liability issues for industry and taxpayers alike.

Although Canadian politicians often mention CCS and the tar sands in the same breath, they aren’t being square with Canadian taxpayers or U.S. drivers. For starters, CCS is really geared to retrofitting coal-fired plants and expanding the economic life of coal. The cumbersome technology can’t really capture carbon from 400-ton mining trucks or most tar sands steam plants, nor can it vacuum methane from tailing ponds.

Canada’s federal government recently admitted in fine print that the “oil sands operations are so diverse ... that only a small portion of the CO2 streams are currently amenable for CCS.” So CCS won’t clean up “dirty oil” or Canada’s global image.

It Takes Energy to Bury CO2

The chief obstacle to CCS is cost. Right now, no country buries lots of CO2 because it is not economical. John Pavlish, a senior U.S. researcher on CCS at North Dakota's Energy and Environmental Research Center, notes that CCS would raise the cost of a power plant by 35 to 100 percent which, in turn, would increase electric bills by 30 to 80 percent. Without a $40 to $80 price tag on a tonne of CO2, not much carbon will ever get buried.

It takes a lot energy to capture, compress and inject CO2 into the ground. In fact 30, percent of the power generated by a coal-fired facility or tar sands power plant would be cannibalized by a CO2 retrofit.

That’s great news for coal companies because CCS demands that utilities burn more coal instead of building windmills. But CCS may be bad news for bitumen, the world’s most capital intensive hydrocarbon. Larcina Energy Ltd, a tar sands developer, recently concluded that “Carbon mitigation costs will negatively impact project economics” because “bitumen is a poor quality hydrocarbon and priced accordingly.”

Alberta is Like a Pin Cushion

Security of storage is also a concern. Not too many places in North America are suitable for carbon burial due to earthquake risks or high density oil and gas drilling. Improperly sealed wells or faulty cement jobs could invite great volumes of CO2 back to the surface. Leaks could also acidify groundwater.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for example, dutifully notes that Alberta is a pin cushion. With more than 350,000 oil and gas wells, it is one of the most intensely drilled landscapes in the world. In other words, CO2 could find its way back to the surface and into people’s basements and wells.

CO2 injection may also cause man-made earthquakes. The rapid depletion of gas wells and the water flooding of oil wells have caused a series of documented earthquakes in Alberta, Texas and the Netherlands. Geologists call it “induced seismicity.” The largest earthquakes ever recorded in Alberta were triggered by oil and gas activity. Natural Resources Canada recently studied a series of earthquakes caused by sour gas removal at the Strachan gas plant in Rocky Mountain House.

Scaling Up Would Take Decades