‘Expensive, Unproven’ CCS Deserves No More Federal Support: IISD:

The report,
released last Thursday by the International Institute for Sustainable
Development (IISD), concludes carbon capture and storage technology
costs too much and takes too long to build to have any hope of helping
industry meet Canada’s 2030 emissions reductions target, The Canadian
Press reports.

Calling the technology “expensive, energy intensive (and) unproven at
scale,” the report urges the federal government not to put any more
public money into the oil and gas industry for carbon capture
deployment.

“The application of CCS does not align with the time
scale or ambition necessary for limiting global warming to 1.5°C,” the
report states. And “the opportunity cost of investing in CCS and the
risk of stranded assets for Canada’s oil and gas sector will intensify
as global climate ambition ratchets up and demand for oil and gas
declines.”

Carbon capture and storage technology has existed for
decades, but it’s expensive and has been slow to scale up, CP writes.
There are currently just seven CCS projects in operation in Canada, five
of them in the oil and gas sector, and only 30 commercial-scale CCS
projects in operation globally. The projects serving fossil companies
capture 2.7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) per year,
just 1.3% of the industry’s pre-pandemic emissions, and 70% of that
carbon is used to push more oil out of the ground through enhanced oil recovery (EOR).