The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers has come out with its latest forecast of Canadian crude oil production over the next 15 years. Today, Alberta’s tar sands put out 1.5 million barrels of oil a day, or 54 per cent of total production output. That will rise to 2.2 million in 2015 (67 per cent of total output) and 2.9 million in 2020 (74 per cent of total ouput). In 2025 the tar sands will reach 3.5 million barrels a day, or more than 81 per cent of total output. You can so where this is going. In 15 years we see conventional production in Canada falling nearly 40 per cent and tar sands production well more than doubling alongside CO2 emissions.

Will there be any meaningful amount of carbon capture and storage in the oil sands by 2020? By 2025? Don’t bet on it. The first demonstration projects will be related to coal, and even then, they will be small and few.

Canada is on a very dangerous path unless it can figure out how to substantially offset these emissions by making dramatic reductions in other areas. Greening Alberta’s electricity sector would be a good start, but that doesn’t appear to be on the radar of those with the power to take the province in that direction. Also, it doesn’t do much to solve the major water issues in Fort McMurray.

The Ottawa Citizen has a story this morning about multibillionaire Bill Gates and his funding of projects that are aimed at controlling the Earth’s climate in the face of rising CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere and the resulting warming of the biosphere. I won’t go into too much detail, except to say that University of Calgary scientists David Keith is among a small group of researchers who are advising Gates and receiving funding from the Microsoft co-founder. Controversy has no doubt followed. The scientists involved say don’t worry, our work is only confined to the lab. But critics of geoengineering — and I would include myself in that group — are concerned that what grows in the lab will be applied to the atmosphere without meaningful public debate about the risks. Already, there is a plan — called the Silver Lining Projects – to test out the whitening of clouds over a 10,000-square-kilometre patch of the Pacific Ocean. The idea is that this would increase their ability to reflect sunlight back out to space before it gets a chance to heat the Earth’s surface.

To me, the first phrase that pops into my mind is “Beware the law of unintended consequences.” I believe Gaia theorist James Lovelock expressed the risks best in a commentary last September in The Guardian U.K.: (more…)

Saw a few stories today, based on an article that appeared in the Globe and Mail, suggesting the federal government has drawn the line when it comes to coal-fired power plants, or at least the kind of plants that don’t capture and permanently store their CO2. Canada’s federal Environment Minister Jim Prentice apparently met last week with the nation’s top power company executives and made the government’s intentions clear. According to the Globe, “Under Ottawa’s proposal, power companies would have to close their coal-fired facilities as they reach the end of their commercial life, largely over the next 10 to 15 years. The companies would not be allowed to refurbish the plants to extend their usefulness or replace them with new coal units, unless they include technology to capture the carbon dioxide and sequester it underground.”

Does this amount to a moratorium on dirty coal? It seems like it does, but the targets are pretty soft and you can bet this government will be so flexible with industry — particularly in Alberta and Saskatchewan — that the effect of this moratorium won’t be felt for a least two decades. And that, unfortunately, is too late to matter. Just how the feds will define “end of useful life” or “refurbishment” can have a dramatic effect on the outcome. Coal plants don’t need major refurbishments. Like refineries, they are in constant repair and maintenance mode. Like an old car, as long as you keep repairing stuff when it breaks it can run forever, really. So you can expect existing coal plant owners, such as TransAlta, to drag this out for a long time. Even worse, TransAlta — the country’s worst polluter – is still building new coal plants, hoping to slide them in under the bell. This includes two projects totalling 500 megawatts that will be in service next year. Those plants could run for 40 or 50 years!

What we need is a meaningful price on carbon, and a hard moratorium that requires carbon capture retrofits by a certain date or a conversion of paid-for coal plants so that they can burn natural gas or biomass. Ontario has committed to phasing out coal power or converting to biomass/natural gas by 2014, but Alberta and Saskatchewan are heading in the opposite direction. (more…)

We all know that making cement is an energy-intensive process, so when carbon prices are introduced in North America it’s going to have a major impact on an industry that quite literally lays at the foundation of our economy. In Ontario, cement maker St. Marys Cement — now part of Brazilian conglomerate Groupo Votorantim – has partnered with stealthy startup Pond Biofuels of Toronto on a project that, since last fall, has already started to capture CO2 from a cement plant in southwestern Ontario. It’s believed to be the first project of its kind in the world. Pond Biofuels, the three-year-old company that developed the processes and algae bioreactor technology behind the project, hopes to demonstrate that the system can be scaled up to accept the emissions from an entire plant or any other energy-intensive industrial facility. In the case of St. Marys, the algae will be harvested, dried using industrial waste heat, and then used to offset fossil fuels that are currently used in its cement kilns. In essense, the CO2 will be recycled over and over again. The company, which became a strategic investor in Pond Biofuels last year, is also investigating the idea of producing biodiesel from the algae that can be used to fuel its own truck fleet.

There are many algae technology companies out there, but it’s nice to see these two Ontario companies actually doing something outside of the lab in a way that directly meets the needs of industry. In fact, Pond Biofuels has its sights set on China as well. The company revealed in December that its St. Marys project had been approved as part of the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate program. This means it will get funding to do a feasibility study that will assess the suitability of its technology for the cement industry in China.

There was a big stink this week when a published study, led by University of Virginia civil engineering professor Andres Clarens, concluded that producing biofuels from algae isn’t as climate-friendly as many people believe, at least when compared to getting biofuels from switchgrass, canola, and – Huh? — even corn. The results, according to an abstract of the study, “indicate that these conventional crops have a lower environmental impact than algae in energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and water regardless of cultivation location.” Why? Because of the need to supply more nutrients — i.e. fertilizer — to algae to stimulate growth, and fertilizer is energy-intensive to produce.

The problem with this conclusion? Clarens based the life-cycle analysis on data that was mostly 10 years old. For example, some current algae cultivation practices, particularly those based on wastewater or sea water, tackle the fertilizer issue head on. So the age of the data is an important bit of information that should have been made very clear in the study — even the abstract. Ten years in the world of technology, particular cleantech, is a long time. I mean, the big R&D push around algae-based fuels only began three or four years ago, and 10 years ago the “cleantech” sector didn’t exist in name. Ten years ago the world was still wrapping its head around Y2K, George W. Bush was just getting into office, Google was still a start-up years from going public, and the TV show CSI (the original one) had its world premiere. In other words, you can expect data about algae cultivation to be, well, rather useless as a reflection of current practices.

This isn’t to blame Clarens. As he told the New York Times’ Green Inc., the most current data out there is simply unavailable to academia. It’s proprietary. (more…)