"The touted tech is still scarce and pricey, and even oilsands allies counsel caution."
"In late June, Alberta Premier Jason Kenney flew to Washington, D.C., with the heads of major oilsands producers to make the case that Canada’s most carbon polluting industry cares deeply about fixing climate change.
The plan they presented to U.S. policy-makers sounded serious and ambitious: they would capture 20 million tonnes of carbon emissions a year from Canadian oilsands projects by 2030 and bury those emissions deep underground. “Right now, we have a label of, ‘Canada has dirty oil,’” Rhona DelFrari, chief sustainability officer at the oilsands company Cenovus Energy, told the Canadian Press. “We want to completely erase that label.”
Scrubbing the “dirty oil” label is a crucial goal for oilsands companies, because most of the bitumen they produce flows down to American refineries, and even modest efforts to wean the U.S. off that oil supply for climate reasons would harm the industry.
But the climate solution that Kenney and executives touted in the U.S. Capitol — known as carbon capture and storage — has a major disqualifying flaw. It may be technically feasible to bury oilsands emissions, but it is also prohibitively expensive, so much so that the technology doesn’t “appear to be economic” and would “achieve a relatively minor impact in reducing CO2 emissions.”"
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