Discussion/background information:

Two large sources of greenhouse gas emissions in Canada include the tar sands and coal-powered electricity plants. Tar sands are one of the fastest growing sources of emissions in Canada, while electricity and heat generation in Canada accounted for fully 16 per cent of Canada’s total emissions in 2006.

To deal with these emissions, the fossil-fuel industry is proposing using “carbon capture and storage” (CCS) to capture the CO2 and sequester it deep below ground. While in theory this seems like a solution for the emissions, and industry-promoted monikers like “clean coal” sound appealing, in practice this technology poses several serious problems.

For one, CCS cannot deliver in time to avoid dangerous climate change. The earliest possible deployment of CCS at utility scale is not expected until 2030 – yet to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, global greenhouse gas emissions have to start falling now.

Second, it has proven difficult to find geologically suitable burial sites that can safely – and permanently –sequester CO2. It is unlikely that enough sites can be found to store the massive and growing volume of CO2 being generated every year.

Third, the process of capturing the CO2 is energy-intensive, increasing the fuel requirement of a coal-fired plant with CCS by between 10 per cent and 40 per cent. This means that wide-scale adoption of CCS could erase the energy-efficiency gains of the past 50 years and increase resource consumption by one third.

CCS plants are also expensive. When preparation of the storage site and transport of the CO2 is factored in, the cost is roughly $30 per tonne to capture and store the CO2. Earlier this year, one of the highest-profile attempts to investigate the use of CCS in an actual power station, the FutureGen project based in Illinois, was cancelled in part because the cost had more than doubled from $830 million to $1.8 billion.

Finally, the high cost of CCS plants would divert critical funding away from other sustainable-energy solutions, such as conservation, efficiency, and renewables like wind, solar, and geothermal. These energy solutions are essentially limitless and don’t generate any CO2.

Because of these and other problems with CCS, the federal government should focus its energy investments on sustainable-energy technologies like conservation, efficiency, and renewables rather than pumping taxpayers’ dollars into unproven – and expensive – technologies like CCS that simply bury the problem.

Questions to ask your candidate:
1. Will you oppose government funding for CCS projects?
2. Will you introduce and/or support legislation to limit all new coal-powered electricity plants in your province, and limit the expansion of the tar sands?
3. Will you support legislation that supports the adoption of renewable energy?

For more information:
www.greenpeace.org/ccs

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