In a story this week, we detail how Parry Sound—Muskoka member of provincial parliament Graydon Smith is selling carbon capture and storage (CCUS) as good for the environment and the economy.
We are not so sure.
Certainly, business seems to like it and in his speech in the Legislature, Smith leaned heavily into how happy it will make Enbridge and others, who we expect will be taking full advantage of the billions of dollars the federal government has earmarked for this tech.
Maybe they're right. Maybe carbon capture and storage is the best way to reduce emissions and meet the targets that will save our planet from homemade catastrophe.
But, when we hear from environmentalist groups, as in an article from Eco Business, "only 26 CCUS plants (are) operating globally, capturing about 0.1 per cent of the annual global emissions from fossil fuels ... (and) 81 per cent of the carbon captured to date has been used to extract more oil from existing wells by pumping the captured carbon into the ground to force more oil out," it gives us pause.
There are proven renewables like solar and wind that environmentalists say can deliver faster results at less cost.
Carbon capture science is in its infancy and therefore expensive and can’t realistically make a significant difference based on cost versus volume of carbon we’d have to capture. Economic models suggest it would be cheaper and effective to simply plant more trees.
And we’re too late to just capture carbon from smokestacks, we need to draw it down from the atmosphere which carbon capture can’t do.
We could compare it to growing petri-dish meat as a solution to the carbon impact of the meat industry and improving animal welfare. We can grow a burger in a petri dish today. It costs somewhere between $20 and $100 to grow a single patty. You can make speeches about how this will save the planet, and it might in 10 years with new technology that doesn’t exist today, but it won’t work yet.
It’s the same with carbon capture. It does work but it’s not scalable. Reducing emissions is much more scalable and faster, because we can produce those technologies efficiently today — hydro, solar, electric cars, and wind. Carbon capture at a scale that would truly make a difference, at a price we can actually implement, does not yet exist. To pretend it does, is to distort and distract us from reasonable and achievable solutions to reducing carbon emissions.
Diverting billions of dollars to polluters may give them incentive to invest in developing this technology. This may be attractive to government and industry and may bring eventual results. But, we suggest governments at both the provincial and federal levels give more thought to the solutions our tax dollars will fund.
