Can Carbon Capture Clean Up Canada’s Oil Sands? [View all]

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http://www.technologyreview.com/news/514221/can-carbon-capture-clean-up-canadas-oil-sands/

[font face=Serif][font size=5]Can Carbon Capture Clean Up Canada’s Oil Sands?[/font]

[font size=4]Alberta will serve as a test bed for large-scale carbon capture and sequestration.[/font]

By Mike Orcutt on May 9, 2013

[font size=3]Canada is betting that carbon capture and storage (CCS), a technology that is fairly well understood but unproven at the scale needed to significantly decrease greenhouse gas emissions, can reduce the environmental footprint associated with making fuel from oil sands—its fastest-growing source of greenhouse-gas emissions. (See “Alberta's Oil Sands Heat Up.”)

If things go as planned, the country’s CCS effort will not only result in emissions cuts, which would start out small in 2015 and then grow into much larger ones over the coming decades—it will also be a first test of the type of large network of pipelines, capture facilities, and storage reservoirs that will be required for CCS to play a significant role in reducing emissions. That knowledge gained, say proponents in industry and government, will be valuable not just to Canada, and could help the CCS industry finally get off the ground.

Deployment of carbon capture technology has been held back by high costs, uncertainty about risk, and the lack of incentives for large emitters around the world to invest in the technology. CCS has not yet been deployed at a commercial-scale power plant, much less at the scale required to play any kind of significant role in a country or region’s long-term emissions strategy. The International Energy Agency has said that the construction of large CCS facilities is far behind schedule if the technology is to play a substantial role in helping the world meet important reduction goals over the next several decades (see “The Carbon Capture Conundrum”).

Alberta, which contains the vast Athabasca oil sands deposits, has committed over $1.2 billion to two world-class CCS projects meant to capture, transport, and store carbon dioxide usually emitted during the oil sands production process. One project will be at a large processing facility run by Shell, and another will connect multiple capture sites to operations that will use the captured carbon dioxide to recover hard-to-reach oil, a process called enhanced oil recovery.

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