The province will determine this fall how to meet federal requirements that all new oilsands and coal-fired power plants opening after 2011 must be ready to capture their greenhouse gas emissions and store them underground, Energy Minister Mel Knight says.
He announced Thursday former Syncrude president Jim Carter will head an industry-dominated panel that will sketch a roadmap for carbon capture, a cornerstone of the provincial climate-change plan.
Some energy officials, like Carter's fellow panelist Epcor CEO Don Lowry, have said the Harper government's recent 2012 target seems severe, although some major oilsands firms have already been designing carbon-capture systems as part of their new plants.
The council includes six other current energy-sector leaders including EnCana CEO Randy Eresman, as well as two senior federal bureaucrats, three provincial officials and only one outsider -- Mike Percy, dean of University of Alberta's business school.
After two major panels told the province and Ottawa in recent months how it can forge ahead with taking the technology mainstream, this new one will be more of an implementation team, devising rules, timelines and government incentives to create the capture and underground storage systems. It will also determine where in Alberta the gas should be piped.
The oilpatch and electricity sectors are hoping for massive government investment into the technology, since the capture, pipeline and storage networks will carry multibillion-dollar price tags that companies are loath to shoulder themselves. A recent federal-provincial panel said both levels of government should pay a combined $2 billion.
The government hasn't committed anything, although the budget this week announced $574 million over three years for climate-change measures, mostly from industry emission fines or federal grants. It's widely expected that most of the money will go toward carbon capture, a technique that some other countries use and that many environmental groups embrace.
Carter argued that the governments which reap taxes and economic benefits from energy firms should help.
"Everybody benefits from this -- government and industry -- and we have to see this as a joint effort going forward," he said.
A provincial press release today boasts that carbon sequestration will be "Canada's largest contribution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions." That's based on the notion that oilsands expansions would lift Alberta's overall emissions much more dramatically if it wasn't capturing the carbon dioxide and piping 139 megatonnes of it underground to substantially cut the sector's emissions levels by 139 megatonnes by 2050.
By that year, the province expects its greenhouse-gas output will be 14 per cent below where it was in 2005, a target Premier Ed Stelmach bills as reasonable but environmental groups and other critics say is woefully inadequate to combat global warming.
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