CCSS = Carbon Capture Storage and Sequestration is a really dirty job. Uncertain and unproven has a lot of money chasing it. But in Canada the provincial government of Alberta has given to the oil companies already 2 Billion to clean up it’s act. Yet they spend it instead on general green PR and publicity Greenwash claiming that CCSS will be coming for the tar sands… and is the answer to clean tar. Same as it is the answer to dirty coal.
Sadly it isn’t so.
Now we know that even capturing and storing some of the carbon that is released in the processing of Canada’s tar sands may not clean the industry up. To turn the vast but dirty resource into useable oil, Canada’s tar sands factories spew vast amounts of CO2 and other even far more toxic, greenhouse gases. Far more energy is used and CO2 produced than the caloric energy output generated by the tar sands oil. Of course that is only when all inputs costs and output costs are estimated and accounted for including the Environmental costs. Including the subsidies Alberta’s provincial and the Canadian federal governments provide for the oil companies running the tar sands to oil projects…
Never mind the free water and free land and energy grants given the companies and never mind the abundant ground pollution and the ashes in the air and the toxic rain and the ground water fouling…
That’s the conclusion of a new study on the potential of so-called carbon capture and storage technology to reduce carbon emissions from tar sands operations.
The Athabasca tar sands of north-eastern Alberta, Canada, hold more than 170 billion barrels of recoverable oil, second only to Saudi Arabia’s reserves. However, the oil is in the form of tarry bitumen that requires a great deal of energy to extract and turn into usable oil – some three to five times as much as conventional crude. The greenhouse gases released during the processing of tar sands make it an environmentally disastrous proposition.
No wonder, then, that the government of Alberta is putting much emphasis, and billions of research and development dollars, into carbon-capture technologies that aim to remove carbon dioxide released by the tar sands industry and store it safely underground.
But a new analysis published this week by the UK consumer cooperative and the UK branch of the environmental group WWF proves that CCSS – carbon capture will be too little, too late. Using the oil industry’s own best-case estimate, that 30 per cent of carbon emissions could be captured by 2030 and 50 per cent by 2050, the analysts note that this falls far short of the reduction needed to make tar sands oil compare favourably with other fossil fuels such as dirty coal and especially the conventional crude oil commonly used.
Therefore adding all the costs the tar sands oils are the dirtiest and should be the costliest dirty fuel of them all.
Go Canada…
CANADA DIRTY – will be the new name of the country.
Yours,
Pano
PS: To the greenwash comes the government operators…saying that carbon-capture technology is still experimental, as the spokesman for the Alberta government’s energy department Jerry Bellika said. To do a paper analysis and suggest that it can’t work is a great hypothetical exercise. We’re trying to do the practical application and get results. But the relity we know from Vattenfall’s experience of over several months running a CCSS program are dismall.
Add to that the dirty Coal factories – Canada is operating and we will be swamped the soonest. Sea level rising is directly related to these moronic projects. Moose floating off into the sunset. Canada dirty really.
