BURYING CARBON DIOXIDE IN UNDERGROUND SALINE AQUIFERS: Political Folly or Climate Change Fix? By Graham Thomson For the Program on Water Issues Munk Centre for International Studies University of Toronto Embargoed until 9:00 AM EST
Wednesday, September 23, 2009 About the Author Graham Thomson is an award-winning journalist with the Edmonton Journal who began
studying carbon capture and sequestration while on a Canadian Journalism Foundation
fellowship at the University of Toronto in 2008-2009.
About the Program on Water Issues The Program On Water Issues (POWI) creates opportunities for members of the private,
public, academic, and not-for-profit sectors to join in collaborative research, dialogue,
and education. The Program is dedicated to giving voice to those who would bring
transparency and breadth of knowledge to the understanding and protection of Canada's
valuable water resources. Since 2001, The Program On Water Issues has provided the
public with analysis, information, and opinion on a range of important and emerging
water issues. Its location within the Munk Centre for International Studies at the
University of Toronto provides access to rich analytic resources, state-of-the-art
information technology, and international expertise. This paper can be found on the
Program On Water Issues website at www.powi.ca. For more information on POWI or
this paper, please contact
Adèle M. Hurley
Director, Program On Water Issues
Munk Centre for International Studies
University of Toronto
1 Devonshire Place, South House, Room 258S
Toronto, Ontario
Canada
M5S 3K7
Tel: 416-892-8919 Fax: 416-946-8915 E-mail: [email protected]
Program support from the Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation and the Tides Canada
Foundation is gratefully acknowledged.
Table of Contents 1. From the Atmosphere to the Geosphere
1
2. The Climate Change Problem
3
3. CCS to the Rescue
5
4. How CCS Works: “It’s not rocket science, it’s rock science”
6
5. CCS, ‘Business as Usual’ and the Politics of ‘Clean Coal’
9
6. A Cemetery for Carbon
11
7. Scale: “Large, massive and daunting”
16
8. Problems: Hazards, risks and unanswered questions
20
9. Liability and Regulation: Problems and questions
35
10. Liability and Regulations: Some solutions and answers (and more questions)
38
11. CCS and Alberta’s Oil Sands
43
12. Buried Treasure: Do saline aquifers have value other than as a carbon cemetery?
44
13. Conclusions: A political fix
45
Appendix A How prepared are we for large scale carbon capture and storage?
50
Endnotes
51
ii Acknowledgements The genesis of this paper lies with Adèle Hurley, Director of the Program on Water
Issues at the Munk Centre for International Studies, who has been described by the news
media as an unsung hero of the environment. She is also something of an environmental
soothsayer for her ability to recognize crucial issues before they catch the public’s
attention. So, too, with carbon capture and sequestration’s potential effect on our
groundwater, an issue largely overlooked or ignored in the larger debate over CCS.
I am indebted to Adèle and the Munk Centre for asking me to prepare this paper. I am
also indebted to the experts whom I interviewed such as Stefan Bachu at the Alberta
Research Council for being patient with my many questions. I offer my heartfelt thanks
to the reviewers who spent part of their all-too-short Canadian summer reading early
drafts and offering suggestions that improved the final product. My thanks, in
alphabetical order, to Jim Bruce, Robert Gillham, David Hughes, Andrew Miall, Ralph
Pentland and Owen Saunders. Thanks to the staff at the Munk Centre, in particular
Sherine Daryanani, Sean Willett and Nina Boric, I would like to offer a special thanks to
Joanna Kidd for editing the paper and to Andrew Nikiforuk, one of Canada’s foremost
environmental journalists, for his advice and expertise on shaping the paper.
On a personal note, thanks go to my colleagues at the Edmonton Journal, notably Allan
Mayer and David Evans. And to my family – Kelly, Erin, Heather, Adam and Ben –
thank you for helping out, pitching in and putting up with me during a CCS-filled
summer.
GT, September 2009
iii 1. From the Atmosphere to the Geosphere T
o envision a solution to climate change look down, not up. And think water, not
air. Located deep underground through North America and around the world are
saline aquifers – geologic formations filled with salt water – that could play a
crucial role in the fight against climate change. Indeed, we might not be able to conduct a
credible fight without them.
Saline aquifers are key to the emerging technology of carbon capture and sequestration
(CCS). Scientists propose to capture huge quantities of the carbon dioxide (CO2) from the
smokestacks of industrial facilities, compress the gas into a fluid form and dispose of it
forever deep underground in the saline formations. The industrial facilities best suited for
CCS are coal-fired power plants where as much as 90 per cent of the CO2 emissions that
are now released into the atmosphere would be captured and injected into the geosphere.
The process also holds mitigation potential for other large emitters such as oil refineries,
cement plants and possibly Alberta’s oil sands.
Proponents argue a fully functional CCS system would fight global warming while
allowing us to continue with the seemingly contradictory practice that got us into the
climate change predicament to begin with: burning huge quantities of fossil fuels.
Marrying the apparently mutually exclusive goals of environmental protection with
fossil-fueled economic growth has united disparate players in the climate change debate –
becoming the lesser-of-two-evils choice of some environmentalists and the savior of
beleaguered coal company executives.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the scientific intergovernmental body
set up by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment
Programme) believes that CCS could account for up to 55 per cent of the world’s carbon
mitigation effort between now and the year 2100. The United States Department of
Energy has studied the deep geologic formations suitable for storage in North America
(the U.S. and Canada) and believes that only saline aquifers offer centuries’ worth of
capacity – theoretically holding at least 3,900 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide.
CCS is already being conducted on a limited scale at three pilot projects worldwide,
including one in Weyburn, Saskatchewan. Scientists working on CCS argue that with
carefully selected repositories operated properly, the technology will be safe and
effective.
CCS technology is expensive, would require large amounts of fresh water and energy,1
and is untested on an industrial level at the scale necessary to achieve significant climate
change results. At the projected peak of CCS, we would be injecting billions of tonnes of
carbon dioxide underground, forcing as much fluid CO2 into the ground as oil being
taken out. It would require an infrastructure system as large and as complex as that built
over the past century for the oil and gas industry, but constructed in one generation. The
challenges relating to CCS are enormous, but some scientists maintain that they can be
met. Others suggest that we have little option but to embrace CCS.
1 Critics, on the other hand, say CCS is what you do when you’re in a hurry and have no
plan ‘B’. Capturing carbon dioxide and disposing of it underground raises many critical
issues that could be major impediments. Nobody knows how billions of tonnes of highly
compressed carbon dioxide will behave underground. Could CO2 eventually leak and find
its way into underground sources of drinking water (USDW)? Could plumes of
pressurized carbon dioxide displace salt water from the saline aquifers into USDW? What
would happen if sequestered carbon dioxide were to leak into the atmosphere or creep
into an underground source of drinking water 50 years from now? Who would be
responsible? Who would monitor the carbon dioxide underground for centuries? What
would happen if carbon dioxide injected in one jurisdiction migrated into a neighbouring
jurisdiction?
Environmental groups such as Greenpeace reject CCS, arguing the technology is, among
other things, expensive, risky, and unproven and that it will take too long to deploy on a
scale large enough to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.2
Who’s right? The clock is ticking. Every tonne of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere
contributes to global warming.
This paper examines the many facets of the CCS issue – the science and technology of
carbon capture and sequestration, the challenges of scale, the politics of ‘business as
usual’ and ‘clean coal’ and the risks associated with CCS. In particular, it focuses on the
potential impacts of CCS on groundwater systems and underground sources of drinking
water – a topic often ignored or forgotten in the debate over carbon capture and
sequestration. The paper also examines issues relating to liability and regulations, the
utility of CCS in Alberta’s Oil Sands, and other potential uses for underground saline
aquifers. There are many perspectives on these issues, and many voices to be heard. We
hope that this paper contributes to a discussion that needs to take place.
2 2. The Climate Change Problem T
he motivation behind carbon capture and sequestration is simple. The global
climate is warming and human-created greenhouse gases are almost certainly to
blame. “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal,” concluded the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its 2007 report.3 Pre-industrial levels of
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were 280 parts per million (ppm). Due to the burning of
massive amounts of fossil fuels they are now around 380 ppm. This has led to an increase
in the global surface temperature of 0.74 degrees C in the last 100 years. Unless we
dramatically reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) we face a continued
warming of the global atmosphere that will be catastrophic to many species on the planet,
including our own.
The biggest GHG is carbon dioxide which accounts for 63 per cent of the man-made
greenhouse gas warming effect. We clearly need to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide.
Normally, the largest and most efficient method of sequestering carbon dioxide from the
atmosphere is performed not by humans, but by nature, using vegetation and the oceans
in a continuous process that keeps the carbon cycle in balance. But the natural cycle can’t
keep pace with man-made emissions that have risen from negligible levels 200 years ago,
before the industrial age began, to approximately 30 billion tonnes a year today.4
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned that to prevent more
than a 2-degree-C raise in global temperature, greenhouse gas emissions in industrialized
countries must be reduced by 25 to 40 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020. That would
stabilize CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere to 450 ppm.5 Meeting this target would
mean reducing carbon emissions by about 10 billion tonnes a year.
We can reduce emissions of greenhouse gases by improving energy efficiencies and
replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy and nuclear power. All of these actions are
expensive, however, and the generation of nuclear energy is fraught with its own set of
problems. Figure 1 provides a comparison of various ways to generate electricity in a
carbon constrained world.6 (For more details on the chart see the endnote).
The global demand for energy is such that emissions of greenhouse gases will continue to
increase unless dramatic steps are taken. We need a man-made solution to solve a manmade problem.
3 Figure 1: How carbon prices influence electricity costs 4 3. CCS to the Rescue T
he best candidates for CCS are large point sources of emissions – the facilities that
emit large amounts of CO2. This includes industrial facilities such as cement
plants, steel factories and most notably, coal-fired power plants. The old adage
that “coal is king” is as true today as it was a century ago. We might communicate by cell
phone and shop in cyberspace but many of us recharge our electronics via coal. Half of
U.S. energy is derived through the burning of coal; that number is closer to 70 per cent in
Alberta.
Although coal may be inexpensive and abundant, it is dirty. There are over 600 coal-fired
power plants in the United States7 and 21 in Canada. The average 600-megawatt power
plant emits four to five million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.8
The most effective solution for climate change would be to shut down the large CO2
emitters. Effective but not practical. Coal plays a major role in the generation of energy
worldwide, and global energy consumption is growing at two per cent a year and is
expected to double by 2035 and triple by 2055.9 In fact, the United States has 33 coalfired power plants under construction or near construction.10 According to the MIT’s
“Future of Coal” report, “China is currently constructing the equivalent of two, 500megawatt, coal-fired power plants per week with a capacity comparable to the entire UK
power grid each year.”11
If we cannot or will not shut down the big emitters of CO2 we have to do something to
shut down the emissions.
The Pembina Institute, an environmental organization in Alberta, is blunt. “The stakes are
high,” it said in a January 2008 report. “Climate change demands action. … The Pembina
Institute views CCS as one of a number of potentially effective technologies for reducing
GHG emissions on the scale required to combat dangerous climate change.”12 The
Pembina Institute sees CCS not as a silver bullet for global warming but as an arrow in a
quiver. However, at this point it’s the biggest arrow we’ve got. Alternative energies
(wind and solar) are expensive. Energy conservation is difficult. Nuclear power is
controversial and expensive to construct. CCS carries the promise of business as usual
with a minimum of inconvenience to the consumer.
David Keith, a Canadian expert on CCS, is confident that lessons learned on small scale
projects will translate well to the large scale: “Essentially we have a toolbox of preexisting components. CCS draws from that toolbox to enable use of fossil energy with
reduced CO2 emissions. Because of the toolbox we can be sure that full-sized coal power
plants with CCS could be built now with industrial performance guarantees. Costs are not
small, but they are comparable to other low-cost means of cutting CO2 emissions.”13
The president of one of Canada’s largest coal-burning power producers presented the
case for CCS in a speech to an international audience in Geneva, Switzerland on May 4,
2009. “One of the prime benefits of CCS is that it will provide a solution to the pragmatic
reality that much of the world cannot afford to – and probably will not – shut down
5 existing coal facilities in a meaningful way in the next 30 to 50 years,” said Steve Snyder
of TransAlta. “The only way to reduce the absolute quantity of CO2 emissions from them
is with some form of CO2 reduction technology. If the world cannot develop a costeffective CCS technology, then it is highly unlikely it can meet the CO2 reduction targets
it is setting for itself.”14
Proponents of CCS argue that the longer the world postpones taking action to cut
emissions, the more CCS will become not just invaluable but inevitable. Gardiner Hill,
manager of technology and engineering for CCS at the energy company BP, estimates
that for every five years of inaction, an extra billion tonnes of CO2 must be cut from
emissions: “Unless we get started now, we don't get the advantage of CCS and the
emission reductions we need.”15
Lord Oxburgh of the Royal Dutch/Shell oil group was even more blunt: “Sequestration is
difficult. But if we don’t have sequestration, I see very little hope for the world.”16
The motivation for large-scale CCS is simple; making it work at a large scale will be very
difficult.
4. How CCS Works: “It’s not rocket science, it’s rock science”17
W
e can catch a glimpse of how carbon capture and sequestration might work on
a grand scale by watching how it already works on the small. CCS is underway
at three unrelated pilot projects in Saskatchewan, Algeria and off the coast of
Norway1 where a total of roughly five million tonnes of CO2 is injected into geologic
formations each year.
In each of these projects, the capture of the CO2 is not performed at a coal-fired plant but
is part of the routine process of stripping excess CO2 during the production of natural or
synthetic gas. The CO2 is then compressed into a supercritical form, or fluid, that is easier
to transport by pipeline and inject deep underground. Figure 2 illustrates the difference in
volume between carbon dioxide as a gas at the surface and as a supercritical fluid below
800 metres underground, showing how carbon dioxide can be compressed for more
efficient sequestration. Figure 3 shows how CCS is carried out.
Proponents of CCS point out that all three projects – with the oldest operating in Norway
since 1996 – have functioned safely and effectively since their inception with no
evidence of problems. (
Jurisdictions worldwide are combining government, commercial and academic expertise
to investigate the feasibility of CCS projects. Alberta, for example, has various
partnerships including the Heartland Area Redwater Project (HARP), the Alberta Saline
Aquifer Project (ASAP), and the Wabamun Area CO2 Storage Project (WASP) –
demonstrating, if nothing else, a talent for acronyms. All are investigating a workable
1 There are actually two projects in Norway: Sleipner and Snohvit. The Weyburn project is sometimes
referred to as the Weyburn-Midale project.
6 CCS system but none so far has an operating pilot project that captures CO2 from a
smokestack, transports it by pipeline and sequesters it in the earth.
Transporting carbon dioxide via pipeline is not new. The United States already has 5,800
kilometres of CO2 pipelines that are used to transport the gas to oil fields where it is
injected underground into depleted oil fields to enhance the recovery of oil. In this
Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR), the injection of carbon dioxide pays for itself by helping
recover more fossil fuels that would otherwise remain underground. However, using CCS
to produce more oil that is then burned, creating more CO2 emissions, undermines the
mitigation goal of CCS.18
Figure 2: The volume of carbon dioxide as a gas at the surface and as a supercritical fluid at depth CO2 will be injected at depths below 0.8 km (2600 feet). CO2 increases in density with depth and becomes a supercritical fluid below 0.8 km. Supercritical fluids take up much less space than gases, as shown in this figure, and diffuse better than either gases or ordinary liquids through the tiny pore spaces in storage rocks. The blues numbers in this figure show the volume of CO2 at each depth compared to a volume of 100 at the surface. Image Source: CO2CRC 7 Figure 3: How CCS Works Enhanced Oil Recovery is one of the big selling points of CCS. In the initial growth of
CCS, proponents suggest that companies will be eager to use the increased amounts of
captured CO2 to recover increased volumes of oil through EOR. However, when the
limited demand for CO2 for Enhanced Oil Recovery is exhausted, CCS will become a
pure cost – and a massive one at that. The government of Alberta, for example, is
spending $2 billion over 12 years on its first round of CCS pilot projects, a cost that is
estimated to increase by up to $3 billion a year for the second round.19 Another point
often muddied in the debate over CCS is that injecting carbon dioxide into the ground to
recover oil is the same as injecting CO2 underground forever. It is not. Although the
Canadian government eagerly points to the Weyburn project as proof positive of the CCS
concept, the inconvenient fact remains that the project is not pure CCS. It is a
combination of CCS and Enhanced Oil Recovery. In the Weyburn project, the CO2 is
captured from a coal gasification plant in North Dakota, compressed into a supercritical
fluid and shipped 330 kilometres by pipeline to Saskatchewan. There it is injected
underground to recover more oil in a continuous loop that sees some CO2 recovered from
the process and then mixed with fresh feedstock of CO2. In 2030, once the oil field is
depleted, approximately 30 million tonnes of CO2 will be sealed in place and the site
decommissioned.
8 CCS and EOR are similar but they also have striking differences. The Enhanced Oil
Recovery process is not focused on what happens to the CO2 but on the oil being
produced. The goal of EOR is energy production while the goal of CCS is environmental
protection.
Proof that EOR works on a relatively small scale is not proof that CCS will work on the
scale needed to fight climate change. “The CCS component technologies (capture,
transport, and storage) all exist today at industrial scale,” says a report from the
ecoENERGY Carbon Capture and Storage Task Force. “What is missing is the full
integration and application of these components in commercial facilities at a large
scale.”20
5. CCS, ‘Business as Usual’ and the Politics of ‘Clean Coal’ I
n July of 2008, the Alberta government, under attack as the largest per-capita emitter
of carbon dioxide in Canada, announced it would spend $2 billion on three to five
projects partnered with private companies to prove the efficacy of carbon capture and
storage. By 2015, the government says the province will be capturing and sequestering
five million tonnes of CO2 annually in what promises to be the largest CCS
demonstration in Canada, if not the world.
By 2050, Alberta says with confidence it will sequester 140 million tonnes of CO2 a year
through CCS – a prediction that is impossible to verify and therefore impossible to
categorically reject.21
At this point in the early development of CCS, pronouncements about goals are as much
about politics as about technology or even the environment. By promising to spend $2
billion, Alberta intends to blunt criticisms about emissions from its coal-fired power
plants and from the oil sands, although the effectiveness of CCS for the oil sands is in
doubt. (This is further explored in section 11).
It is extremely unlikely that CCS can deliver ‘clean tar sands’. However, the technology
does promise to mitigate emission from coal-fired plants which is why it is sometimes
referred to as “clean coal” technology. In theory, CCS can be used to capture 90 per cent
of the CO2 emissions from a coal-fired plant and isolate the gas underground forever.
“For the coal industry, which is concerned that coal is being cast as the major climate
villain, this is a way to make their product look ecologically acceptable,” writes author
and journalist, Richard Heinberg. “For mainstream environmental organizations, CCS
offers a strategy to reduce climate impacts without having to call for painful reductions in
coal consumption and thus in all likelihood a reduction in both total energy use and
economic growth – a politically untenable position.”22
‘Clean coal’ provides politicians with a way to reassure the public that we can mitigate
CO2 emissions with as little pain as possible. CCS promises a desperately needed solution
to global warming while maintaining an equally desperate addiction to fossil fuels.
9 ‘Clean coal’ and politics are inextricably linked. In the United States, coal states are
swing states, as demonstrated in the last election where Barack Obama came out in
defense of ‘clean coal’ while campaigning in Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
Politicians, even those who until recently questioned the reality of global warming, are
now jumping on the CCS bandwagon with a rhetorical flourish. Prime Minister Stephen
Harper established the ecoENERGY Carbon Capture and Storage Task Force, which in
2008 urged the government to spend $2 billion on CCS experiments. The Task Force
likened the size and importance of CCS to previous ‘nation-building’ projects such as
construction of the national railway more than a century ago.
“Each of these ‘nation building’ initiatives was and continues to be in the interest of
Canadians,” said panel chairman Steve Snyder, president of TransAlta, Alberta’s largest
power producer and a big proponent of CCS. “Each began with public and private
support in order to spread the risks associated with the first few projects and to enable
action on activities that entailed an upfront capital cost but that were clearly in the
public’s best interest. Canada possesses the technology, geology, and expertise to be a
world leader in the development and implementation of CCS technology.”23
Snyder went on to explain that government has to take the financial risk because “as with
any new environmental technology a financial gap exists between the cost of a plant with
CCS and what would otherwise be built to produce the same industrial outputs.”24 In the
United States, too, other industries have struggled at first, relying on government help.
“Several successful technologies, including energy technologies, have faced similar
challenges as CCS faces now,”25 concludes a Stanford University paper that compares
CCS with the growth of novel technologies including the U.S. nuclear-power industry,
the U.S. sulphur dioxide-scrubber industry and the global liquid natural gas (LNG)
industry.
Private corporations are relying on public monies to fund CCS pilot projects that might
yet prove to be a dead-end technology. That should come as no surprise considering
Canadian oil and gas companies are relatively tightfisted when it comes to research and
development. As a federal parliamentary panel discovered, the sector spends “less than a
tenth of the Canadian industrial average” on R&D.26
As David Lundberg, a credit analyst with Standard and Poor’s pointed out in Global
Power Report on June 7, 2007: “There is consensus that CCS will be an integral part of
the solution to climate change. However, given its high costs, it will not be economically
justified in the near term, when CO2 reduction requirements are likely to be small, and
other approaches to CO2 reduction will be less expensive.”27
But CCS is as much about the politics as about the science or economics.
Canadian Environment Minister Jim Prentice has already proclaimed CCS a proven
technology today and he confidently predicted success tomorrow: “It is applied
commercially in Enhanced Oil Recovery kinds of operations and it will be commercial in
the future.”28
10 Premier Ed Stelmach has assured Albertans that CCS will allow the province to green the
oil sands and reduce provincial CO2 emissions from “business as usual” by 70 percent by
2050.29 President Barack Obama offered his support in an interview on Canadian
television in 2008 when he said: “I think that it is possible for us to create a set of clean
energy mechanisms that allow us to use things not just like oil sands, but also coal.”30
The political assurances are premature, the promises ethereal but for anyone dependent
on fossil fuels the allure of ‘clean coal’ is irresistible. If CCS is to make coal ‘clean’ it
has to dispose of the dirty emissions somewhere and that means putting CO2 deep
underground.
6. A Cemetery for Carbon T
o get a good idea of where to go about sequestering CO2 in Canada, perhaps the
best source is the United States Department of Energy’s website, which contains
the Carbon Sequestration Atlas of the United States and Canada (Second Edition).
Figure 4: Locations of saline aquifers (in blue) in Canada and the US Source: U.S. Department of Energy Carbon Sequestration Atlas of the United States and Canada (Second Edition), 2008 11 The Atlas is an impressive 140-page report with many colourful, informative maps that
graphically illustrate the locations of the largest emitters of carbon dioxide and the best
locations to bury those emissions, including deep saline aquifers (see Figure 4). As the
title suggests this is a transboundary investigation that looks at carbon sources and
potential sequestration locations as if the 49th parallel didn’t exist. And it surely does not
exist underground in the geologic formations where Canada and the U.S. hope one day to
bury a large portion of their carbon waste. One of the most promising areas for CCS is
the Williston basin that straddles the international border (see Figure 5)
Figure 5: Major Depositional Basins Source: U.S. Department of Energy Carbon Sequestration Atlas of the United States and Canada (Second Edition), 2008 The Atlas is also a graphic illustration of how the Americans are looking at carbon
sequestration not merely as a national issue but as a continental strategy. According to the
Atlas, there is enough capacity in geologic formations in North America to sequester the
3.2 billion tonnes of CO2 emitted each year by 1,700 large industrial facilities.
As the DOE’s Atlas illustrates, the best geologic formations for sequestering carbon
dioxide are mature oil and natural gas reservoirs, deep unmineable coal seams, oil- and
12 gas-rich organic shale, basalt formations and deep saline formations.2 The most
extensive of these ‘by far’ are the saline formations with an estimated capacity ranging
from 3,900 billion tonnes to 12,200 billion tonnes. But the Atlas has a caveat: “(M)uch
less is known about saline formations because they lack the characterization experience
that industry has acquired through resource recovery from oil and gas reservoirs and coal
seams. Therefore, there is a greater amount of uncertainty regarding the suitability of
saline formations for CO2 storage.”31
Figure 6: Cross‐section of the transboundary Williston Basin Source: U.S. Department of Energy Carbon Sequestration Atlas of the United States and Canada (Second Edition), 2008 CCS proponents argue that water in saline aquifers is brackish or brine and, other than
use in the oil sands, has little commercial value. They also argue that a joint study
published this year by the University of Toronto and University of Edinburgh showed
that naturally occurring CO2 dissolved in water can stay trapped in underground aquifers
for millions of years.32 “What this tells us is that dissolution into the water is a very major
2 There are proposals to inject liquefied CO
2 deep into the oceans or, via holes drilled into the seabed, to sequester it in the geologic formations underneath the sea. Both would be expensive and a technological challenge involving supertankers of liquid CO2 shipping to disposal sites at sea. This paper is not looking at either of these options. 13 sink and therefore can be a major sink for carbon capture and storage in an engineered
short-term fashion,” said co-author Barbara Sherwood Lollar at the U of T. 33
Figure 7: Options for terrestrial and geological sequestration Source: Source: U.S. Department of Energy Carbon Sequestration Atlas of the United States and Canada (Second Edition), 2008 The long-anticipated FutureGen CCS pilot project in Illinois – cancelled by the Bush
administration and resurrected by the Obama administration – is focused on testing saline
aquifers at a depth greater than 1,000 metres (where the CO2 will remain under pressure
in a supercritical, fluid state). The U.S. government hopes a successful FutureGen project
could open the way for hundreds or even thousands of similar sequestration projects:
“Because the FutureGen Alliance wants to ensure that this project is broadly replicable
around the U.S. and the world, it is important to demonstrate CO2 storage in this widely
occurring type of geologic formation.”34
To understand CCS, it is important to understand that saline aquifers are not caverns of
water but sponge-like rock formations where salt water is held in the pore space, (see
Figure 8).
14 Figure 8: Microscopic section of storage rock CO2 will be trapped as a supercritical fluid in tiny pore spaces in the storage rock, as is shown by the blue spaces between the white grains of quartz in this photograph of a microscopic section of storage sandstone. Source: CO2CRC Carbon dioxide injected into these saline formations will rise until it hits an impermeable
layer at the top of the formation called the cap rock. This is referred to as the physical
trapping of the CO2. In solubility trapping, some of the CO2 will dissolve in the salt
water, but this will involve a relatively small amount of the injected gas, perhaps five per
cent initially and will increase over time. (As Dr. Sherwood Lollar discovered, solubility
is an effective trapping mechanism). The third process is mineral trapping where
dissolved CO2 bonds with the aquifer’s rock formation and in effect locks itself in place.
Under the right conditions CO2 is easily absorbed by water. This chemical reaction has
been recognized for hundreds of years. The first recorded attempt to mix carbon dioxide
and water took place in 1772 and was a great success, giving us soda water. Nature has
done it a few times, too, giving us Perrier water. To some proponents of CCS, the
technology is akin to filling the world’s largest seltzer bottle.35
It is, of course, more difficult than that. For one thing, the bottle is unimaginably large.
15 7. Scale: “Large, massive and daunting” T
o implement CCS on the scale necessary to combat global warming will be, in the
words of one its strongest proponents, a “large, massive, daunting task.”36 The
words do not do it justice. The scale is staggering.
In Alberta, for example, the government wants to sequester five million tonnes of CO2 a
year by 2015, and then scale up sequestration by almost 30 times that amount until 140
million tonnes are being sequestered annually by 2050. By comparison, the longestrunning sequestration project in the world – Statoil’s Sleipner project – currently injects a
relatively tiny one million tonnes a year. In the United States alone, coal-burning power
plants emit about 1.36 billion metric tonnes of CO2 a year.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology report on the Future of Coal tried to quantify
the immensity of the scale: “If 60% of the CO2 produced from U.S. coal-based power
generation were to be captured and compressed to a liquid for geologic sequestration, its
volume would about equal the total U.S. oil consumption of 20 million barrels per day.”37
On a global context, sequestering one billion tonnes of CO2 would mean building 3,600
injection projects on the scale of the Sleipner project.38
Figure 9: Annual rate of deep geologic CO2 storage needed to move from the 5 million tonnes of CO2 being sequestered in projects worldwide today to 260 million tonnes by 2020 (to meet the IPCC ceiling of 550 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere)39 16 Looking to the future, the numbers become astronomical. As the MIT report points out,
global emissions from coal are approximately 9 billion tonnes (Gt) of CO2 per year and
are expected to more than triple to 32 Gt per year: “These volumes highlight the need to
develop rapidly an understanding of typical crustal response to such large projects, and
the magnitude of the effort prompts certain concerns regarding implementation,
efficiency, and risk of the enterprise.”40
The MIT report concludes, “We have confidence that large-scale CO2 injection projects
can be operated safely.” However, not everyone who has studied the numbers is so
confident.
Figure 10: Scale of worldwide sequestration to meet IPCC goals of 2.1 billion tonnes by 2050 and 22 billion tonnes by 2095 to (to meet the IPCC ceiling of 550 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere41 CCS deployed at the magnitude necessary to fight global warming will require huge
amounts of carbon dioxide sequestered under great pressure into the geologic formations
in North America. Injecting that much CO2 into saline aquifers has the potential to affect
the saline water in ways not well understood.
“If geologic sequestration is deployed to the extent that the Nation is storing about 500
million tons of CO2 per year, equivalent to emissions from 50 to 60 coal-fired power
plants of 1000 megawatt size, then we must recognize that the storage process will
displace about 0.6 km3 or 172 billion gallons of formation water each year,” said Robert
C. Burruss, a research geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in a 2008 submission to
17 a House Subcommittee hearing. “Such large movements of saline formation water have
the potential to disturb regional ground-water flow systems, possibly displacing saline
formation water laterally or vertically to near-surface environments where it could
contaminate shallower drinking water supplies or impact ecosystems.”42
The increased pressure from the supercritical CO2 could even cause earthquakes,
according to Curt M. White, who was head of the U.S. Department of Energy’s carbon
sequestration group until 2005. In 60 years of operation, one large, coal-fired plant would
generate the equivalent of three billion barrels of CO2 that White says would need a
storage site as large as a major oil field: “[R]ed flags should be going up everywhere
when you talk about this amount of liquid being put underground.”43
David Hawkins, head of the climate change program at the Natural Resources Defense
Council and an advocate of CCS, says the scale should not be an impediment: “Yes,
burying billions of tons of CO2 is a huge job, but that is not necessarily an argument
against CCS. You can’t solve a big problem without a big effort.”44
However, the effort necessary would not be merely “big” but so immense as to be
impractical, according to Vaclav Smil, an energy expert at the University of Manitoba.
The self-described “intellectual agent provocateur” has bluntly declared that “carbon
sequestration is irresponsibly portrayed as an imminently useful option for solving the
challenge [of global warming].”
Smil has estimated that simply capturing a fraction of global emissions and sequestering
them in one year would require moving volumes of fluid CO2 on a scale similar to the
worldwide transportation of oil – a massive enterprise requiring tens of years and trillions
of dollars. “Beware of the scale,” he said: “Sequestering a mere 1/10 of today’s global
CO2 emissions (< 3 Gt CO2) would thus call for putting in place an industry that would
have to force underground every year the volume of compressed gas larger than or (with
higher compression) equal to the volume of crude oil extracted globally by the petroleum
industry whose infrastructures and capacities have been put in place over a century of
development. Needless to say, such a technical feat could not be accomplished within a
single generation.”45
Figures 11 and 12 illustrate the massive infrastructure necessary for industrial scale CCS
as imagined by the Integrated CO2 Network (ICO2N), a consortium of 18 companies.
ICO2N is planning a pipeline network in Alberta that would spread into western Canada
and eventually to other parts of Canada and into the United States. The initial cost of a
proposed 400 kilometre section of pipeline was estimated at $1.5 billion but was later
revised to $5 billion (including the costs of capturing the carbon).46
Another skeptic is Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at
Stanford, who doesn’t believe CCS will reduce emissions by as much as we think: “Coal
with carbon sequestration emits 60- to 110-times more carbon and air pollution than wind
energy...”47
18 A counter-argument from proponents is that CCS is preferable to what we have now:
unfettered emissions of CO2.
Let’s imagine that an attempt at large-scale CCS goes ahead despite the hurdles. Does
injecting five million tonnes of CO2 a year safely at a few pilot projects for a decade or so
mean we can do the same at 1,000 sites for a century or more? This is explored in the
following section. Figure 11: Proposed CO2 pipelines48 19 Figure 12: Potential pipeline hubs in Western Canada that would spread east to include possible CCS projects in Ontario and Nova Scotia49 8. Problems: Hazards, risks and unanswered questions he first problem that critics of CCS often point to is the economics. The cost of
CCS begins with the capture of CO2 at source. Figures from the U.S. Department
of Energy indicate that electricity generated at a new coal-fired power plant with
carbon capture technology would cost almost double that generated at a conventional
power plant ($114 US a megawatt-hour compared with $63). This cost could be reduced
to $103 US a megawatt-hour using more advanced integrated gasification combined
cycle technology and engineers are hoping to drop the price even further.50
T
"[Carbon capture] costs half again as much as the cost of the plant, and physically, you
have to double the amount of real estate of the plant to retrofit it on the back of a plant
that already exists," says Charlie Bullinger, senior engineer at the Great River power
plant near Underwood, North Dakota. The carbon capture technology is also an energy
parasite requiring 30 per cent more power to capture the carbon dioxide from a
smokestack. “At a minimum, you'd have to build 30 percent more power plants to get
back to the base of where you first started.”51
20 To the costs of carbon capture, one has to add the costs of transportation and then
sequestration. The International Panel on Climate Change estimates the cost of
sequestering one tonne of CO2 would range from $25 US to $115.
The economics of CCS might prove fatal to some projects or even to many, but this paper
is not concerned primarily with whether the economics of CCS makes sense. Whatever
the outcome of discussions on the economics of the technology, it is likely that some
large-scale CCS projects will proceed. What will that mean for the environment? CCS
comes with problems, hazards, risks and hidden environmental costs. These are discussed
in this section.
Problem 1: Increased use of freshwater “Energy and water are indeed inextricably linked. Most Americans do not
realize that they use more water turning on lights and running appliances
each day than they do directly through washing their clothes and watering
their lawns.” Carl O. Bauer, Director, National Energy Technology
Laboratory, U.S. Dept. of Energy. 52
Thermoelectric power facilities, such as coal-burning plants, need massive amounts of
water. Not all the water is consumed; most is withdrawn from a water body and then
returned to it, albeit in a different (warmer) condition than originally. In a power plant
water is heated to more than 500° C to create steam to turn turbines to generate electricity
(25 gallons or 95 litres of water for one kilowatt-hour of power according to the U.S.
DOE). The plants also use water to cool the steam back into liquid form to start the
steam-turbine-electricity cycle over again – which is why power plants are usually
located near lakes or rivers. Only agricultural irrigation is responsible for a greater
quantity of freshwater withdrawals.
That thirst will grow under CCS.
The process required to capture and then compress CO2 at a conventional coal-fired plant
will need much more water than the same plant without carbon capture technology
because carbon capture technology is energy-intensive.
An August 2009 report for Australia’s National Water Commission noted that “coalfired power plants incorporating carbon capture and storage (CCS) could be one-quarter
to one-third more water intensive [than conventional plants].”53
Carl O. Bauer (quoted above) said that “DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory
(NETL) projects that, in the absence of successful development of new advanced CO2
capture and water management technologies, implementation of today’s CO2 capture
technologies would significantly increase freshwater consumption by fossil-based power
plants.”54 A 2008 report from NETL concluded that by the year 2030, carbon capture
could increase water withdrawal in the U.S. “anywhere from 2.7 BGD (billion gallons a
day) to 6.0 BGD” and water consumption could increase from 1.9 BGD to 4 BGD.55
21 The report points out that will be a problem “particularly in the arid west and southwest,
and in the expanding southeast” areas of the U.S. The analogous regions in Canada are
Alberta and Saskatchewan, the very provinces where most CCS is expected to take place.
In “Heating Up in Alberta: Climate Change, Energy Development and Water,” author
Mary Griffiths warns that “the province’s fresh water resources are under pressure.
Summer river flows are declining, periods of prolonged drought experienced in the past
are likely to return, and climate change is further increasing the uncertainty about future
water supplies.”56 (Just months after the Pembina Institute released Dr. Griffith’s report
Alberta suffered its driest spring on record.57)
“We can develop all the zero-carbon technologies we want, but without a reliable supply
of water, they amount to nothing,” warned Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) in comments
made to the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee in March, 2009.58
Figure 13: Estimated raw water usage with and without CO2 capture59 Illustration: A comparison of water usage in power plants with carbon capture and
without (for more details on the chart see endnotes
Problem 2: Enhanced Oil Recovery is not CCS Proponents of CCS say the technology and the safety of CO2 injection has been proven
by decades of Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) in which energy companies have injected
highly pressurized CO2 underground to boost the recovery of oil in depleted fields.
However, as previously noted, EOR is not the same as CCS. EOR is employed over a
relatively short term (decades) to recover oil from a depleted field. It is not concerned
with storing carbon dioxide indefinitely or even with keeping track of where the CO2
ends up after the EOR process is completed.
Wyoming Governor Dave Freudenthal explained the difference between the two in a
cautionary speech to the 8th Annual Conference on Carbon Sequestration in Pittsburgh.
Freudenthal has high hopes for CCS but admitted the still unproven technology for longterm sequestration is ‘not ready for primetime’. “It is not proper to equate EOR activities
automatically with CCS,” said Gov. Freudenthal. “You combine a bunch of CO2 and
22 some liquid underground, you have more than an adequate mixture to dissolve cement in
an oilfield plug.”60
The MIT report on the Future of Coal, which is supportive of CCS, also cautions against
overconfidence when comparing CCS and EOR. “(R)egulations differ, the capacity of
EOR projects is inadequate for large-scale deployment, the geological formation has been
disrupted by production, and EOR projects are usually not well instrumented. The scale
of CCS required to make a major difference in global greenhouse gas concentrations is
massive. For example, sequestering one gigatonne of carbon per year (nearly four
gigatonnes of carbon dioxide) requires injection of about fifty million barrels per day of
supercritical CO2 from about 600 1000 MW of coal plants.”61
An article in the May/June, 2009 Edition of “Carbon Capture Journal” dissects and
deconstructs the win-win argument of EOR/CCS to demonstrate its illogic. Author Sam
Gomersall, a director at CO2DeepStore, writes that injecting one tonne of CO2 produces
three barrels of oil that would not otherwise be recovered. That’s good news for an oil
company but bad news for the fight against global warming.
Gomersall estimates that generating the equivalent amount of energy through EOR
results in five times more emissions than energy produced from a coal-fired plant with
CCS (750g/kWh vs. 150g/kWh). “There has been much focus on CCS with EOR as a
combination providing a unique win-win solution” he says, “However [EOR] is not a
viable CO2 abatement technology and will result in increased emissions.”62
Using CCS to recover more oil is, of course, economically attractive – so attractive that a
recently released report on CCS for the Alberta government emphasizes the Enhanced Oil
Recovery side of CCS, arguing that by injecting 450 million tonnes of carbon dioxide
underground, the province could recover an extra 1.4 billion barrels of oil from
conventional reservoirs worth $105 billion (assuming $75 per barrel of oil).63
Let’s look at that from a different angle. Burning three barrels of oil on average generates
about one tonne of CO2 which means that burning those 1.4 billion barrels will produce
about 444 million tonnes of CO2 – almost exactly the amount of CO2 injected in the first
place. In other words, Alberta would get credit for burying 450 million tonnes of CO2 but
as far as the global climate is concerned almost no carbon dioxide would have been
removed from the atmosphere.64
Problem 3: How much containment space do we actually have? This will seem like an odd question given the massive amount of pore space offered by
saline aquifers in North American alone – at least 3,900 billion tonnes of capacity,
according to the U.S. Department of Energy. However, that capacity is potential, not
actual.
We don’t know for sure how much of that space can be used for sequestration. Sally M.
Benson, Director of the Global Climate and Energy Project at Stanford University, says
that careful site selection for CO2 sequestration projects is crucial. Among the points she
stresses:
23 •
•
•
“I would never put CO2 underground unless I had a good seal.”65
“You want to know where all the active and abandoned wells are in the field
because every well is a potential leakage point.”66
“You certainly don’t want them (faults and fractures) to be active and you need to
do studies in advance to make sure that as you pressurize the reservoir they
remain intact.”67
Not all saline aquifers are created equal. If we check off the requirements for an ideal
sequestration site, a number of aquifers will fail to qualify – those with bad seals,
abandoned wells and faults.
Dr. Stefan Bachu, a scientist with the Alberta Research Council and a world authority on
CCS, says detailed studies must be done to determine exactly how much of the potential
space can be used. Some of the saline aquifers, for example, will be physically connected
to oil fields under development and, therefore will be unavailable as storage sites. Others
might not have a cap rock suitable for high-pressure storage.
“The first estimate (of pore space) needs to be refined and we may discover that we do
not have what we think … [t]hat has to be really studied but it has not,”68 says Dr. Bachu.
He estimates that the cost of making a full estimate of the volumetric capacity is
relatively modest, perhaps $7 million CDN for Alberta. But until that is done, we will not
have an accurate picture of the capacity to sequester CO2, and that means scientists like
Dr. Bachu are reluctant to make predictions.
“I think that the technology is sound. I think it will work for the first few decades. I don’t
know what will happen after because of the scale,” says Dr. Bachu. “If your question is,
‘Are you confidant that (we) will be still able to put so much CO2 and more in 100 years
(from now)?’ I will say I don’t know. I don’t know if it will have the capacity to take
what we have today and what will increase from now… I am confident that we can do (it)
for the next 40, 50, 60 years. I don’t know about 100.”69
The troubling notion that we might have less capacity than first appears is raised in
MIT’s study “The Future of Coal”. The study notes that “Most efforts to quantify
capacity either regionally or globally are based on vastly simplifying assumptions about
the overall rock volume in a sedimentary basin or set of basins. Such estimates,
sometimes called ‘top-down’ estimates, are inherently limited since they lack information
about local injectivity, total pore volumes at a given depth, concentration of resource
(e.g., stacked injection zones), risk elements, or economic characteristics.”70
24 Problem 4: Leaks (flaws, faults and the ‘pincushion effect’) “The biggest risk of storage and saline aquifers is potential impacts to
ground water.” Sally M. Benson71
There will be leaks.
CCS expert David Keith said as much in a paper investigating the leakage of wastewaster
pumped underground in Florida. Since the 1970s, Florida has disposed of three billion
tonnes of partially treated wastewater by injecting it into huge saline formations
underground (93 per cent of the formations were deeper than 900 metres). The water –
contaminated by, among other things, ammonia and fecal coliforms – migrated into
underground sources of drinking water. The pollution was deemed of little risk to public
health and the government modified its regulations to allow the injections to continue.
The analogy to large scale CCS is inescapable. “It seems unlikely that large-scale
injection of CO2 can proceed without at least some leakage,” concludes Dr. Keith. The
answer, says Keith, is to create procedures “dealing with leaks when they occur.”72
The largest concern expressed by critics, and even some proponents, is having CO2 leak
from the geological storage site into the atmosphere and/or groundwater. Proponents say
the odds of CO2 leaks are very small if the site is selected carefully, the sequestration
conducted properly and the monitoring done methodically.
In fact, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts the vast majority of CO2
will stay in place. “Observations from engineered and natural analogues as well as
models suggest that the fraction retained in appropriately selected and managed
geological reservoirs is very likely (a probability between 90 and 99%) to exceed 99%
over 100 years and is likely (probability between 66 and 90%) to exceed 99% over 1000
years.”73
The key phrase here is “appropriately selected and managed geological reservoirs.”
The best sites would be those with strong cap rocks and few if any old wells puncturing
the rock. “If, however, you have abandoned wells or if you have faults and fractures that
create a short circuit for the water, it could go up those,” says Stanford’s Dr. Sally
Benson. “And then finally if you have other gases present like hydrogen sulfide or
sulphur dioxide or if there is some residual methane or hydro carbon, those could migrate
up.”74
It should be noted here that coal-fired plants won’t be injecting pure, food-grade CO2 into
the ground but rather a soup of other elements and chemicals.
“Captured CO2 often contains various by-products of combustion processes such as
nitrogen oxides (NOx) and sulphur dioxide (SO2) as well as trace heavy metals including
lead, mercury and cadmium,” says a Greenpeace report into carbon capture and storage
called False Hope. The report warns that “co-storage of CO2 with sulphur dioxide (SO2)
increases the risk of leakage due to its chemical properties. In contact with water, SO2
forms the highly corrosive sulphuric acid that more readily dissolves materials, such as
25 the cement used to seal wells. A greater risk of leakage means higher likelihood of
damage and liability. How much SO2, if any, to allow in captured CO2 streams will need
to be determined.”75
The possibility that we could be injecting a toxic brew of chemicals underground that
will, through chemical reactions, make their way out is a concern voiced not just by
environmental groups.
“Carbon dioxide becomes problematic when we take it in a polluted form, pressurize it
and try to store it in the ground where it may move where we don’t want it, mix with
water or mobilize metals,” 76 says Bonnie Lovelace with the Water Protection Bureau of
Montana. She spells out the possible pollutants: “In Montana, fly ash from burned coal
has been found to contain a number of pollutants including boron, selenium, arsenic,
mercury, sodium, potassium, magnesium, sulfate, calcium, chloride and radioactive
material. If we add cement plants to the group of facilities capturing emissions for
sequestration, then we add more pollutants to the mix. The possible pollutants increase as
types of processes are added to the universe of those capturing the emissions. The best
numbers we have heard regarding cleaning the pollutants from the flue gas is about 90%.
That leaves 10% of the pollutants that could be in the liquid put under ground. Once
underground, the carbon dioxide and companion pollutants may: 1) work their way to the
surface where pressure loss will return it to a gaseous and deadly state, 2) may move with
groundwater as a pollution plume, and 3) may interact with the geologic body and
mobilize more pollutants.”77
Additions to any brew may include elements already underground such as arsenic or lead
that could, according to Dr. Benson, be leached out of the rock by the acids formed by
water reacting with the CO2 or SO2.
The most direct route for any leaks would likely be through abandoned oil and gas wells,
forgotten and crumbling. According to the MIT report “The Future of Coal,” "[t]here are
large numbers of orphaned or abandoned wells that may not be adequately plugged,
completed, or cemented… Little is known about the specific probability of escape from a
given well, the likelihood of such a well existing within a potential site, or the risk such a
well presents in terms of potential leakage volume or consequence.”78
So many things could go wrong with sequestering carbon dioxide under high pressure
deep in the earth that Dr. Benson has drawn up a chart she uses in public presentations.
Her list follows.
26 Potential Consequences of Geological Sequestration of CO2 1. Worker safety – Industrial operations accidents – CO2 exposure due to leakage from surface and subsurface facilities 2. Financial losses – Emissions to atmosphere – Premature closure – Litigation expenses 3. Groundwater quality degradation – CO2 and geochemical reaction products – Brine or gas displacement, including dissolved or separate phase hydrocarbons 4. Resource damage – Migration to oil and gas fields – Migration to minable coal 5. Ecosystem degradation – Terrestrial plants and animals – Aquatic plants and animals 6. Public safety – CO2 exposure due to leakage from surface and subsurface facilities 7. Structural damage – Induced seismicity – Differential land surface subsidence or inflation 27 Figure 14: What could go wrong79 What could go wrong with carbon sequestration at a “poorly conceived and executed storage project”. Highly pressurized CO2 is leaking through geological fractures and corroded well casings, finding its way into groundwater, surface water, homes and the atmosphere. There is the possibility that an unmapped or forgotten well will allow the CO2 to escape
directly to the surface. A big enough leak into the atmosphere could prove immediately
fatal to living organisms, including humans, in large enough concentrations. Exposure to
concentrations of CO2 above 17 percent for one minute will result in “loss of controlled
and purposeful activity, unconsciousness, convulsions, coma, and death,” according to
the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.80
Experts, such as David Keith think a catastrophic leak into the atmosphere is a remote
possibility and that the chance that a properly engineered CCS project would contaminate
groundwater is a “long shot.”81 Keith argues that any risks associated with CCS are far
less than the consequences of allowing global warming to remain unchecked: “Just to put
this in perspective, right now we kill 3,000 people a year from fine particulate pollution
from coal-fired power plants. You’ve got to have some perspective on what the relative
risks are.”82
28 Figure 15: How CO2 could escape via an abandoned oil well.83 Figure 16: Close‐up of how CO2 could escape through a corroded or otherwise compromised well casing.84 29 The key to success for Dr. Keith and Dr. Benson is proper site selection, engineering and
monitoring. “We must therefore caution strongly against scenarios that present leakage as
inevitable, or even likely,” says Dr. Benson. “Leakage is conceivable, but is unlikely in
well-selected sites, is generally avoidable, predictable, can be detected and remedied
promptly, and in any case is extremely unlikely to be of a magnitude that would endanger
human health and the environment if performed under adequate regulatory oversight and
according to best practices.”85
“To me the biggest leakage issues have to do with conduits to the surface that we've
produced,” says the U of T’s Dr. Sherwood Lollar. “In many of these systems there are
bore holes as you know that have been drilled by us for all kinds of purposes, for water
resources (and) in particular the deep ones for hydrocarbon and oil exploration. The
likeliest place to get leakage back up is right through those.”86
Old, leaky wells are already a problem in Alberta.
In 2005, the little Alberta community of Rosebud made headlines when some residents
demonstrated they could set their tap water on fire. Methane had contaminated their
groundwater aquifer and would leak into their homes whenever they did something as
commonplace as getting a drink or taking a bath. Affected residents, who now truck their
water in, blame the contamination on gas companies drilling into local coal deposits for
methane gas. After a government-sponsored investigation, the Alberta Energy Resources
Conservation Board concluded the methane occurred naturally in the well water and
industry was therefore not to blame.
But that didn’t end the debate or the controversy. Local residents continue to point the
finger at industrial contamination while the coal-bed methane industry continues to
profess its innocence. Illustrating the great complexity and mystery of how oil, gas and
water behave underground, one expert said they might both be right.
Karlis Muehlenbachs, an Earth Sciences professor at the University of Alberta, believes
that the contamination in the water under Rosebud is a mixture of man-made and natural.
Dr. Muehlenbachs says he can’t rule out coal-bed mining as a source but the
contamination may be caused in part by leaks from older oil and gas wells that have made
their way to the groundwater over three or four decades. “I can prove at Rosebud that the
contaminant is predating to some extent the coal bed methane” said Dr. Muehlenbachs.
“Basically, what I can prove is that the gas in some of the Rosebud wells is deeper, much
deeper, than the gas from the coal. And I also know from the historical record (the ERCB
records) the place is like a pincushion of deep wells drilled … in the 60s, 70s, 80s.”87
The ‘pincushion’ effect on the land around Rosebud is not unique in North America
where large tracts of land have been perforated by oil and gas wells, creating man-made
paths for contaminants. As Dr. Muehlenbachs points out, in Alberta “in the last 70 years
we’ve drilled 400,000 wells, at least” and he estimates one-quarter may have sprung
slow, insidious leaks: “You’re drilling a hole in the ground and you’re putting cement
down there and you hope it plugs it. And you hope that there’s a seal between the cement
and the steel pipe and the rock and basically they’re just not stable. They’re not good
corks.”88
30 Figure 17: The ‘pincushion effect’ worldwide made graphic.89 As the American Water Works Association pointed out in a presentation to the U.S.
House Subcommittee on Environment and Hazardous Material on July 24, 2008, “Many
states with extractive industries do have maps and surveys which are not sufficiently
precise for geologic sequestration. … Other states have antiquated data or virtually no
data to indicate the presence of very old abandoned wells or mines. … Some of these
abandoned wells or mines might be more than 100 years old.90
Leaks could also undo the mitigation goal of CCS, according to University of Toronto
professor Danny Harvey in an upcoming book on carbon free energy. “If cumulative
storage reaches 500 Gt C (billion tonnes) and the leakage rate were only 1%/yr, that
would produce an emission of 5 Gt C/yr, and would compromise any possibility of
stabilizing atmospheric CO2 at 450 ppmv (parts per million) or even 550 ppmv.”91
Problem 5: Saline Displacement The American Water Works Association is the largest and oldest society of water
professionals in the world representing more than 4,600 utilities that supply water to 180
million people in North America.92 Large-scale CCS projects could endanger
underground sources of drinking water, says the AWWA, not just through leaks but
through displacement of saline. Simply put, the pressurized carbon dioxide plume
injected over years into a saline aquifer would force salt water from the aquifer into
underground sources of drinking water.
The AWWA listed its concerns in a detailed presentation by Don Broussard to the U.S.
House Subcommittee on Environment and Hazardous Material on July 24, 2008
31 (Broussard is on the AWWA’s board of directors and is Water Operations Manager for
the Lafayette Utilities System in Lafayette, Louisiana).
AWWA is concerned that injecting CO2 under high pressure into geologic formations
will affect the subsurface environment: “This can cause saline aquifers located close to
the carbon dioxide plume to be displaced into existing USDWs (Underground Sources of
Drinking Water), contaminating the freshwater aquifer and rendering it unusable as a
drinking water resource.”93
A 2007 study at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory studied saline displacement
and concluded the impact of the CO2 plume covers an area “much larger” than the CO2
plume itself. “Thus, even if the injected CO2 itself is safely trapped in suitable geological
structures, large-scale injection and related brine displacement may affect shallow
groundwater resources.”94 (See Figure 18).
Figure 18: Schematic showing how pressure from a CO2 plume could have an effect far from the injection point.95 The Berkeley study continued: “Even if separated from deep storage formations by
sequences of low-permeability seals, freshwater resources may be hydraulically
communicating with deeper layers, and the pressure buildup at depth would then provide
32 a driving force for upward brine migration. This can be, for example, via local highpermeability flow paths such as faults and abandoned boreholes.”96
The study also pointed out that if one large point source, such as a coal-fired plant,
wanted to put all its emissions into a single formation, “a significant pressure buildup will
be produced, which can severely limit CO2 storage capacity, because overpressure and
geomechanical damage need to be avoided.”97 This is a reminder of Stefan Bachu’s
warning that we cannot count our saline capacity chickens before they are hatched. We
might not have as much usable sequestration space as we first thought.
Problem 6: Lack of Information on Groundwater Resources Not only do we know little about how billions of tonnes of CO2 will behave in saline
aquifers over centuries and what it thus might do to our groundwater, we don’t know as
much as we should about the groundwater itself. How can we start large-scale carbon
sequestration that could impact on our groundwater without first knowing more about this
resource?
A report earlier this year from the Council of Canadian Academies, for example, decried
Canada’s ignorance of its groundwater even though 10 million Canadians rely on
drinking water that comes from beneath their feet:98 “The last comprehensive assessment
of Canada’s groundwater resources was published in 1967. The Groundwater Mapping
Program managed by the GSC (Geological Survey of Canada) aims to assess 30 key
regional aquifers; only nine assessments have been completed. At current rates, it is
expected that the mapping will not be complete for almost two decades. In view of the
importance of better hydrogeological knowledge as input for models and for better
groundwater management generally, a more rapid pace of aquifer mapping is
necessary.”99
Actually, mapping is now underway or complete for twelve of 30 key regional aquifers,
according to a news report published in August, but the project completion date is still
two decades away, putting Canada far behind a similar mapping of transborder aquifers
in the United States. (See Figure 19). "At the present rate, it will take another 22 years to
complete the inventory of the 30 key regional aquifers to the point that the information
will be adequate to support decision-making,” said the news article based on a Canadian
government report. It quoted Alfonso Rivera, head of Natural Resources Canada’
groundwater mapping program: “We are in a relatively bad position vis-a-vis our
neighbours on the south because our knowledge is very poor when it comes to
groundwater … They do have much better knowledge than we do on their side.”100
For the Council of Canadian Academies, combining an aggressive CCS regime with our
lack of knowledge about groundwater could spell disaster. Among its concerns:
“Potential groundwater risks include the gradual migration of carbon dioxide into shallow
aquifers and resulting changes in the groundwater chemistry and overall water quality, as
well as the displacement of deeper native brine and the triggering of changes in shallow
groundwater-flow regimes.”101
33 Figure 19: Status of NRCan Aquifer Assessment Source: Accessed from: http://ess.nrcan.gc.ca/gm/aquifer_map_e.php Problem 7: Micro‐seismic events (earthquakes) “Pressure build-up caused by CO2 injection could trigger small seismic
events.” IPCC Special Report on Carbon Capture and Storage, 2005.102
There is the very real possibility that the pressure from massive amounts of supercritical
CO2 injected underground will cause seismic activity. These “induced” seismic events are
well documented in the oil and gas industry as illustrated by the article, “Triggered
earthquakes and deep well activities” in the Journal of Pure and Applied Geophysics: “To
date, more than thirty cases of earthquakes triggered by well activities can be documented
throughout the United States and Canada.”103
Man-made mini-earthquakes occur not just in areas noted for geologic faults, says
Calgary-based geologist Jack Century who has spent more than 50 years studying these
34 events: "It isn't just earthquakes that are a problem but it's when you start injecting fluids
into the earth and you don't know what you're doing, you can start small seismic events,
we call them micro seismicity and they can cause fractures, and the fractures themselves
can interfere with the reservoir and violate the integrity of the reservoir and cause
leakage. It doesn't become a hazard in terms of earthquakes but it becomes a hazard in
terms of escaping liquids and you don't know where they're going to go."104
Micro-seismic events could cause a leak. So could an old, crumbling well casing, or a
weak cap rock, or a highly migrant plume of CO2, or an active fault. The risk of any of
these happening may be small for a carefully chosen, competently managed operation.
But what happens when we have thousands of wells injecting hundreds of millions of
tonnes of carbon dioxide a year?
What happens when you have a leak? Who is responsible?
9. Liability and Regulation: Problems and questions “Adverse health effects caused by high levels of CO₂ can range from minor,
reversible effects to mortality, depending on the concentration of CO₂ and
the length of the exposure.” U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. 105
C
arbon dioxide is not a poisonous gas but it can be deadly. In 1986, a giant plume
of naturally occurring carbon dioxide suddenly erupted from the bottom of Lake
Nyos in the African nation of Cameroon and asphyxiated 1,700 unsuspecting
people in their sleep. Carbon dioxide can kill in concentrations above 30 per cent by
displacing oxygen in the air and suffocating its victims.106
The Lake Nyos eruption demonstrates the potential lethality of carbon dioxide gas and is
thus often cited by the news media and critics of CCS as evidence of the dangers of
carbon dioxide sequestration.
The example, although dramatic, is misleading as evidence of what could go wrong with
carbon sequestration in a geologic formation.
“The sudden release of a year’s or so worth of CO2 from engineered sites in such a short
amount of time is simply not possible: neither release through geological pathways nor
through man-made wells could lead to such catastrophic rates,” said Dr. Sally Benson in
a letter to Loni Hancock, Chair of the Assembly Natural Resources Committee for
California on July 2, 2007.107
Sequestered CO2 is not sitting in a giant cavern ready to explode but is contained in the
tiny sponge-like pore spaces of the saline aquifer’s rock formation. “You fill a balloon
with water and you increase the pressure, you poke it, it will burst,” explains Dr. Bachu.
“But if you fill a sponge with water and then you poke it the water will seep out.”108
Dr. Bachu says leaks are possible but, as one of the authors of the IPCC report on CCS,
35 he confidently believes 99 per cent of the CO2 that is sequestered will stay in place. Even
having a one per cent leak with CCS, adds Bachu, is much better than what we have now:
unchecked emissions of greenhouse gases.
However, even if a catastrophic leak into the atmosphere is unlikely what would happen
if a small but chronic leak contaminated drinking water or allowed the sequestered CO2
into the atmosphere to contribute to global warming? Who would be responsible for
cleaning it up and paying compensation? Who would monitor the CO2 for centuries to
make sure it’s not leaking.
At this point, we don’t know.
Figure 20: US EPA Flow chart demonstrating the vulnerability of the geologic system to unanticipated migration, leakage, and undesirable pressure changes and its possible consequences to human, plant and animal life.109 36 This uncertainty could bring large-scale CCS to a halt before it even gets started, if the
reaction of Kinder Morgan Energy Partners LP is any indication. Chief Executive Rich
Kinder told an energy summit in Houston in June 2009 that his pipeline company would
not join any CCS projects unless the U.S. government figures out who is legally liable if
CO2 leaks out of its sequestration. “We’re not going to do that, and no right-thinking
person would.”110
The companies operating the sequestration sites would probably be liable during the
sequestration process and government would probably take over after a site was
decommissioned. But this remains undecided, frustrating supporters of CCS who want
the technology introduced at a large scale as soon as possible.
The authors of MIT’s exhaustive “Future of Coal” report noted that “Sequestration as a
practical large-scale activity requires work across the board, including science,
technology, infrastructure design, regulation and international standards. None of the key
technical and public acceptance issues has been addressed with sufficient intensity. The
program is characterized instead by small projects, many performers … and
conversations that may have the virtue of involving many constituencies, but does not
grapple with answers to the hard questions.”111
A January, 2009 Harvard University paper – Advancing Carbon Sequestration Research
in an Uncertain Legal and Regulatory Environment – explains that without
comprehensive federal laws or regulations, “CCS faces legal uncertainty in virtually
every aspect of activity, including:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
CO2 capture (e.g., performance requirements under future regulation);
CO2 transportation (e.g., pipeline ownership, safety, regulation and access);
state property law governing reservoirs, pore space, and injected CO2;
liability for leakage of CO2 (regulatory liability for emissions control, and
contractual liability for carbon trading);
liability for damage to property (induced seismicity, commingled resources);
liability for trespass (multiple users of reservoirs, boundary disputes, including
transnational and international waters);
liability for CCS activities after transfer of ownership of property;
health, safety and environmental liability (worker safety, groundwater
contamination, flora, fauna) under federal and state regulations;
CCS site selection, permitting, operation and closure;
long-term monitoring, remediation, and financial responsibility for CCS sites; and
treatment and accounting of CCS as a mitigation measure under voluntary and
mandatory climate change regimes.”112
In Canada, the regulation of CCS lies with the provinces which have jurisdiction over
natural resources and local environmental issues. Alberta expects to use its existing rules
for acid gas injection sites as a template for at-scale CCS even though its acid gas
injection program was never intended for such a large undertaking.
37 Among the questions that Alberta has not looked at yet: What would happen if carbon
dioxide injected into a saline aquifer in one jurisdiction migrated into another? “What if a
plume in the United States made its way to Canada, or vice versa?
Owen Saunders – Executive Director of the Canadian Institute of Resources Law at the
University – says the legal issues are virtually endless. "Suppose the Alberta government
were to approve significant injections into a deep saline transboundary aquifer. Under
current legislation, it is not clear how the federal government could even trigger the
federal environmental assessment process. Given the nature of such an aquifer, the
normal triggering mechanisms for the process – found, for example, in federal legislation
related to fisheries, navigation or migratory birds – would be inapplicable. Nevertheless,
if the injections led to transboundary harm, the potential for significant international
liability is clear. And of course that liability, should it arise, would as a matter of
international law attach not to the Government of Alberta but to the Government of
Canada – with the costs ultimately borne by all Canadian taxpayers."113
Many questions remain, “virtually none of which have been looked at very seriously,”
says Prof. Saunders.114
The issue of liability not only affects compensation in the future but the mechanics of
how the technology is implemented today. In the paper “The Liability of Carbon
Dioxide,” MIT professor Mark de Figueiredo and his colleagues raise the possibility of a
Catch 22: “If liability is fully borne by the private sector, the potential unbounded
liability would make widespread deployment of carbon dioxide storage unlikely. On the
other hand, having the public sector bear the financial responsibility for future leakage
could affect the precautions taken by storage operators in the near term.”115
In other words, make the private sector responsible for leaks and it will shy away from
implementing sequestration; make the government responsible and private contractors
might cut corners to save money on sequestration, thereby increasing the risk of leaks.
10. Liability and Regulations: Some solutions and answers (and more questions) “A major barrier to deployment of CO2 capture and geological storage at
the present time is the absence of a comprehensive policy, legislation and
regulatory framework for implementation of CCS.” Stefan Bachu, Alberta
Research Council.116
I
n the race to establish large-scale CCS projects, the United States is moving quickly
to address the complicated questions of how to regulate the process and assign or
assume liability. Canada seems to be lagging behind.
In July 2008, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed new federal
requirements for protecting the nation’s drinking water to “address the unique nature of
38 CO2 for GS [geological storage]. The relative buoyancy of CO2, its corrosivity in the
presence of water, the potential presence of impurities in captured CO2, its mobility
within subsurface formations, and large injection volumes anticipated at full scale
deployment warrant specific requirements tailored to this new practice.” 117
Since 2005, the EPA has held seven workshops and two public stakeholder meetings on
the effective management of geological carbon storage. (Canada has held none). The
EPA’s website lays out for the public what has been done, what is being done and what
will be done. Links provide the public and experts with a picture of a clear, transparent
process that is a mix of classroom education and town hall meeting. 118
In June of this year the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee approved the
American Clean Energy and Security Act to form a “comprehensive national strategy for
deployment” of CCS. The bill amends the Clean Air Act and Safe Drinking Water Act
and requires Federal agencies, with leadership from the Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA), to:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
develop a comprehensive strategy for commercial deployment and deliver a report
to Congress within one year;
identify barriers and regulatory challenges and recommend regulation, legislation,
and other actions to facilitate CCS deployment;
establish regulations for geologic storage;
amend the Clean Air Act and Safe Drinking Water Act to establish regulations for
geologic storage (including measures to protect human health and the
environment by minimizing risk of escape of CO2 to the atmosphere, and
regulations for certification, monitoring, recordkeeping, reporting, public
participation and information sharing among state, EPA and tribal authorities);
require EPA to make final the rules for carbon dioxide geologic sequestration
wells, including financial responsibility requirements, within one year;
require EPA to identify a coordinated process for certifying and permitting
geologic storage sites within two years; and
require emissions reporting for storage in geologic sites.119, 120,121
In August 2009, the EPA put the brakes on its proposals to regulate carbon dioxide
geologic sequestration (GS), by asking for a new round of public review and comment.
The agency is concerned that new academic studies have uncovered more evidence of
potential risks to underground sources of drinking water. According to the EPA, “Risks
to USDWs from improperly managed GS projects can include CO2 migration into
USDWs, causing the leaching and mobilization of contaminants (e.g., arsenic, lead, and
organic compounds), changes in regional groundwater flow, and the movement of greater
salinity formation fluids into USDWs, causing degradation of water quality.”122
And what about Canada? Is there anything analogous to the U.S. Clean Energy and
Security Act occurring in this country? Or to the EPA’s proposals for drinking water
protection?
Not on the same scale.
39 A report in January, 2008 from a federal-provincial CCS task force (established by
Alberta Energy and Natural Resources Canada) mentions water only in passing in respect
to saline aquifers. “These deep rock formations are highly permeable, they are saturated
with extremely saline and therefore unusable fluids, and they are not connected to ground
water sources or other valuable minerals.”123
"There's a lack of regulatory framework for CCS,” according to Ed Whittingham with the
Pembina Institute. "We haven't dealt very much with CCS in this country."124
In 2006, Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) issued a report – “Carbon Capture and
Storage: A Compendium of Canada’s Participation” – that outlines Canada’s progress on
CCS and how various projects, such as that already underway in Weyburn will help “to
develop coherent public policies with respect to regulations, emission-credit trading, and
a publicly acceptable approach to CO2 storage.” 125
But the report reads more like a shopping list of projects real and proposed than a road
map toward CCS regulation. Robert Page, the TransAlta Professor of Environmental
Management and Sustainability at the University of Calgary, says work on the necessary
regulatory framework is progressing in Canada at universities such as the U of C but next
to the U.S. “we haven’t got anything comparable yet in Canada.”126
This summer NRCan helped create a federal-provincial CCS Network to coordinate
various provincial and federal departments that are working on issues such as the
protection of groundwater. “We have discussed a number of regulatory and CCS-related
policy areas that need work – and this area is one of them that we have identified,” said
Kevin Stringer, Director General of the Petroleum Resources Branch at NRCAN. “In
fact, we have had a substantive discussion on what research is being done on the matter,
what the US is doing, what types of well classes we have now, what rules are already in
place in the various jurisdictions, and what work we should be doing together.”127
However, to a member of the public on the outside trying to look in, it is not clear exactly
what is being done now or might be done in the future. It is also unclear what role
Environment Canada will play in the protection of groundwater since NRCAN appears to
be taking a leading role in this area. Like much of the CCS regulatory development in
Canada, the workings of the provincial-federal CCS Network is a closed-door process
that is difficult for the public to unlock.
The U.S., on the other hand, is moving more decisively and transparently than Canada.
Because CCS is different from other underground storage activities, with unique risks
and challenges, the U.S. EPA has introduced proposals for a new class of injection well –
Class VI – specific to CCS which stipulates issues such as site selection, monitoring, well
construction and testing, decommissioning, and the closure of the sites.
There’s nothing like it in Canada.
Alberta, at this point, seems intent on regulating large-scale CCS with rules under its
Class III well system that is designed for small-scale injection of acid gas. Acid gas is
40 carbonic acid and hydrogen sulfide (H2S) that is stripped from sour gas wells and injected
into geologic formations. The practice has been performed in western Canada since 1990
and, like Enhanced Oil Recovery, is offered by proponents as proof that CCS can work
safely.128 Acid gas injections, however, are tiny compared with the plans for large-scale
CCS. Over a 13-year period, for example, 48 acid gas injection projects pumped about
4.5 million tonnes of acid gas underground. Exactly how much acid gas has been injected
in Alberta since 1990 is a difficult number to uncover. Officials with the Alberta Energy
Resources Conservation Board (ERCB) have been unable to provide a figure despite
repeated requests from the author over the summer.
Dr. Bachu, who once worked for Alberta’s regulator (ERCB), coauthored a 2009 paper –
“Review of failures for wells used for CO2 and acid gas injection in Alberta, Canada” –
that concluded the province needs better regulations: “The implementation of a proper
regulatory framework for the drilling, cementing, completion and abandonment of CO2
and acid gas injection wells is essential for reducing and preventing injection well
failures, preventing gas leakage, protecting groundwater and energy resources, and
protecting public safety.”129
Alberta regulators don’t seem to feel the same urgency or concerns as their U.S.
counterparts. According to the ERCB – which oversees the province’s oil, natural gas, oil
sands, coal, and pipelines – the current regulations are fine. “We feel we have a strong
robust regulatory system and in comparison to others in the world, one of the best,” says
Dr. Tristan Goodman, special adviser to the chair of the ERCB. “The rules that are in
place are built around public safety, environmental protection and resource conservation
no matter what the volume. Even if the government wants to go to billions (of tonnes of
carbon dioxide) the regulations will handle that from the perspective of the technical
basis on which they’re built.”130
Finding the existing rules and regulations for acid gas is not a simple task for a lay
person, as the Alberta Carbon Capture and Storage Development Council acknowledges:
“The ERCB regulatory approach to CCS development is not consolidated into a single
directive but rather occurs over multiple regulations based on aspects such as the
subsurface environment, land infrastructure, public consultation and well construction
(Directive 65, Directive 56 and Directive 51). In addition to published regulatory
requirements the ERCB can place additional unique ‘conditions’ on any approved CCS
development. Unique conditions are used to ensure that specific technical differences
from one development and another are taken into account.”131
Nowhere do the ERCB regulations mention drinking water.132
Unlike the transparent process in the United States, the Alberta system is opaque at best
and most times simply obscure. “The rules in place right now, we are going to look at
them and determine are they adequate for large scale carbon capture or do they need to be
modified or amended,” says Sandra Locke, executive director for carbon capture and
storage development for the Alberta’s Department of Energy. “I'm not in a position to say
that they do or do not yet because we haven't done the research.”133
41 Locke expects to have some recommendations on CCS regulations to pass on to
government within 12 months but that is not her ultimate deadline because Alberta does
not expect to have its CCS pilot projects running at full steam until 2015: “So we have
five years to get the definitive rules in place for measuring monitoring and verification.
It's not going to take us five years. I'm just saying it's just a timing issue. There is no
large-scale CCS going on in the province at this moment.”
Alberta’s current rules are simply not stringent, strong or clear enough for scientists who
want to move ahead with CCS. “The current ERCB requirements for acid gas injection
need to be reviewed in light of the large volumes of CO2 which will be injected,” says
Mary Griffiths, a former Pembina researcher on CCS and water issues for the Pembina
Institute who now does consulting work for organizations such as the Alberta Research
Council.134
David Keith is even more blunt: “If we are going to manage large injections of CO2, the
current infrastructure won’t work. It won’t assure the public it is safe. It will be open to a
bunch of problems … The current regulation does not deal with the large problems well
enough, it doesn’t know how to handle the small risks over a large area.”135
The Alberta government’s Advisory Council on CCS is urging action on regulation:
“Authorities responsible for oil and gas regulation should provide regulatory clarity to
move the first CCS projects forward by: quickly confirming legislation and regulation
related to pore-space ownership and disposition rights; clearly articulating the terms for
the transfer of long-term liability from industry to government; and increasing the
transparency of regulatory processes.”136
However regulations are no guarantee of security.
Ian Duncan, a professor of economic geology at the University of Texas at Austin, and
proponent of CCS, pointed out a loophole in the EPA’s authority: “I have a concern that
the EPA does not have any legislative mandate to require, encourage or even suggest that
operators choose the most optimal (lowest risk of leakage) sites available.”137
This raises a troubling question: what good are strong rules and regulations if an operator
choosing a less-than-ideal site for sequestration can effectively sidestep them?
42 11. CCS and Alberta’s Oil Sands A
cautionary tale can be found in Alberta’s oil sands that initially looked to CCS as
a way to mitigate the industry’s huge carbon footprint. With CCS, Premier Ed
Stelmach was proud and optimistic that he had found a way to green the tar sands
and improve his province’s battered environmental image. “Alberta believes CCS can
help ensure the economy and the environment both thrive in the 21st century. That is the
backbone of Alberta's position – a pragmatic approach that will allow us to continue to
make a significant contribution to the Canadian economy while at the same time
protecting the environment.”138
However, oil sands companies have backed away from CCS, realizing the technology
will likely not help the industry reduce CO2 pollution because the oil sands have too
many diffuse emission sources. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation obtained internal
federal briefing notes that explained that CCS is better suited to large single-point
industrial sources of CO2 such as coal-fired plants. “Only a small percentage of emitted
CO2 is ‘capturable’ since most emissions aren’t pure enough,” the notes say. “Only
limited near-term opportunities exist in the oil sands and they largely relate to upgrader
facilities.139
Despite this, the Alberta government insists CCS will somehow help the oil sands in a
significant way.140 The government’s assurance that 140 million tonnes of CO2 will be
sequestered each year requires explanation. Even a firm supporter of CCS has his doubts.
“I don’t know where they got that 140 number from,” says David Keith. “If we have
climate change we cannot keep taking oil out of the ground and putting it into the air.”141
Thus far, CCS has failed to deliver on its promise to the oil sands despite the optimism
and enthusiasm of politicians and industry leaders. And the Alberta government is
learning that CCS projects are more difficult to get off the ground than first thought. The
government had hoped to announce the corporate winners to share the $2 billion in seed
money to start CCS pilot projects by the end of June 2009. Citing the scope and
complexity of the projects, the government has delayed making a decision and instead of
having three to five successful bidders, it has just three. As this paper is being written
(late August) the Alberta government hopes to have letters of intent signed by the end of
summer 2009.
Other CCS pilot projects appear to be running into trouble and delays as well. Two of the
largest coal-burning utilities in the U.S. announced in late June that they were pulling out
of the $2.4-billion US FutureGen project in Illinois.142 Also in June, public concern over
the technology in Germany delayed a legislative vote on CCS.143 A month later, public
fear in Germany prevented a pilot project that had been hailed as a “beacon of hope”
from injecting CO2 underground. “This is a result of the local public having questions
about the safety of the project," said Staffan Gortz, head of carbon capture and storage
communication at Vattenfall's Schwarze Pumpe project in Spremberg, northern Germany.
"People are very, very sceptical." 144
New plants have been proposed for Texas and California but David Hawkins, a
proponent of CCS, provides a list of cancellations or postponements in his recent paper,
43 “Twelve years after Sleipner: moving CCS from hype to pipe”. The list of cancellations
and postponements includes “Statoil’s Halten project in Norway, Saskpower’s 300MW
oxyfuel plant in Canada, NRG’s Huntley IGCC in New York State, Hydrogen Energy’s
Carson and Kwinana projects and, more (in)famously, the ‘restructuring’ of the
FutureGen project in the U.S. by the Department of Energy(DOE).”145
Opposition to CO2 sequestration has coined a new acronym: NUMBY – Not Under My
Backyard.
12. Buried Treasure: Do saline aquifers have value other than as a carbon cemetery?
Saline aquifers are viewed as an ideal location to isolate excess carbon dioxide not just
because they’re prevalent and huge, but because they have little or no perceived value.
Are saline aquifers worthless?
In a global-warming world that is running short of fresh water, we may be forced to turn
to some of the saline aquifers as sources of drinking water, according to Don Broussard
of the AWWA: “[I]n several communities across the country, waters that were previously
considered to be unusable, due to a salinity that was above 10,000 TDS, are now being
used as drinking water sources. As desalination technology improves, even more saline
water may be used in the future.”146
In areas running short of water, there might be competition between those who want to
use a saline aquifer as a source of drinking water and those who want to use it to
sequester carbon dioxide. According to researchers with the Pacific Northwest National
Laboratory, “In such cases, permitting or garnering public acceptance for proposed CCS
projects will require regulators and potential CCS operators to strike a balance between
the future needs for high quality drinking and agricultural water, and the use of CCS in a
given area as a climate change mitigation strategy.”147
Saline aquifers also have a value due to their rich mineral content, which has attracted a
new generation of miners who want to bring “silica, lithium, zinc, manganese, and other
valuable materials in a hot stew of brine from 10,000 feet (3,000 metres) underground to
the earth's surface.” Simbol Mining is one company that is mining saline aquifers for
lithium. A recent news article about the Houston-based company said, “If Simbol
Mining's plans work out, within a decade it will deliver one-fourth of the world's
increasing demand for lithium, used in batteries of hybrid and electric cars without
creating waste or pollution. The start-up eventually aims to mine more than 100,000
tonnes of lithium carbonate each year from geothermal sources. That's more than the
current annual market for the compound; the company expects demands for it to
quintuple by 2013.”148
Simbol Mining is expecting a huge spike in demand for lithium, a key component in the
manufacture of high-tech batteries for a new generation of electric and hybrid vehicles.
Ironically, the very deep saline formations that are being regarded as a convenient place
44 to bury carbon dioxide might also offer the raw resources for a completely different
climate change solution.
13. Conclusions: A political fix E
very year the burning of fossil fuels pours 30 billion tonnes of CO2 into the
atmosphere, a threat to climate security. Both the Alberta and Canadian
governments have enthusiastically endorsed Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) as
a new and powerful tool to avert dangerous climate change. Industrialists, civil servants
and university scientists generally agree that Canada won’t be able to maintain its
standard of living or rate of fossil fuel consumption in a carbon constrained world
without employing this controversial technology.
Many sincere and credible scientists argue that CCS remains the best mitigation option to
prevent global temperatures from rising above 2 degrees. Some environmental groups
such as the Pembina Institute advocate for CCS as a bridging mechanism to reduce
greenhouse gases while building and investing in renewable energy.
The technology holds the promise of massive reductions in emissions but any success
may ultimately be limited to a relatively few projects due to cost, liability, technology,
scale and public skepticism. CCS may turn out to be another costly Faustian bargain and
classic technical fix.
The very promise of CCS, whether delivered or not, will extend the life of coal and other
hydrocarbons, thus making more economies dependent on fossil fuels. Instead of buying
us time to find alternate sources of clean energy, CCS is buying politicians’ time to avoid
making tough, unpopular decisions. The allure of CCS threatens to divert resources from
energy efficiency and delay more durable reforms. As one former nuclear expert put it:
“CCS may be, politically, an easy way out of having to make more difficult and
sustainable choices.”149
Enhanced Oil Recovery is Not CCS: Politicians claim that CCS will work as well as
Enhanced Oil Recovery. Yet CCS and EOR differ in many important ways. EOR, an
economic technology employed by the oil industry, recycles relatively small amounts of
CO2 to recover remaining oil from previously exploited formations. About two-thirds of
the injected CO2 returns with the oil or gas to the surface while a steady pressure is
maintained in the formation. EOR, which isn’t publicly monitored, ultimately produces
more oil and more greenhouse gases.
In contrast CCS, an uneconomic technology designed for coal plants, seeks to bury vast
amounts of carbon underground for 1,000 years or longer. This process will build up
pressure in saline formations that could fracture seals or overlaying rock caps. The
Weyburn EOR project will eventually sequester a relatively small 30 million tonnes of
CO2. Large-scale CCS projects will have to trap and hold billions of tonnes in order to
slow climate change.
45 The Oil Sands Illusion: Although both federal and Alberta politicians have promoted
CCS as a way to ‘green’ bitumen production in the oil sands, (Canada's largest growing
source of emissions) industry remains divided about its utility and cost. Of 20 firms
selected by the Alberta government to submit proposals for carbon capture and storage
projects, eight major oil sand firms (including Suncor and ConocoPhillips) chose not to
participate for largely economic reasons. With the exception of upgraders most oil sands
emissions are too impure or dispersed for this technology. A study on unconventional or
highly carbon-rich fuels by the Rand Corporation concluded that even if CCS could be
applied to the oil sands, it would "still leave unaddressed the CO2 emissions from final
combustion of the fuels." In other words unconventional fossil fuels "do not, in
themselves, offer a path to greatly reduced carbon dioxide emissions."150
Nuclear-like Economics: CCS remains a complex and extremely expensive technology
with numerous scientific uncertainties and large knowledge gaps. In this respect CCS
probably mirrors the growth of other novel energy technologies such as nuclear power
and liquid natural gas (LNG) in the 1960s. The cost of both of these technologies
increased over time due to rapid growth, safety and security concerns and evolving
regulations. Capital-intensive technologies such as CCS may be “prone to this type of
negative experience curve.” Due to unanswered questions about the behavior of CO2
underground, CCS projects will need more monitoring. This reality means that the cost of
CCS projects could experience repeated regulatory shocks.151
The Challenge of Scale: The Alberta government proposes to bury 140 million tonnes of
CO2 by 2050 and has invested $2 billion of taxpayer’s money in several demonstration
projects. But even highly respected CCS researchers such as David Keith doubt the
veracity of such optimistic scenarios. In sum, scaling up CO2 deployment from
megatonnes to gigatonnes remains a difficult challenge around the world.
By one estimate the United States would have to construct 300,000 injection wells at
a cost of $3 trillion by 2030 just to keep emissions at 2005 levels.152 University of
Manitoba energy expert Vaclav Smil has calculated that governments will have to
construct CO2 infrastructure about twice the size of the world’s crude oil industry just
to bury 25% of the world’s emissions.153 It’s significant that Howard Herzog, a
respected carbon capture research engineer at MIT, routinely laments that no largescale power plant with CCS yet exists on the planet: “Is it reasonable to expect to
build hundreds of power plants with CCS by 2050 when we are having so much
trouble building just one today?” 154
Leakage and Groundwater: Large-scale deployment of CCS will inevitably result in
leaks over time into the air or groundwater. 155 These leaks, a threat to human health and
ecosystems, could also pose a variety of largely unquantified risks to groundwater
systems located above carbon storage basins throughout western North America. The
rapid injection of CO2 could force brine waters to migrate into the shallow portions of
freshwater aquifers. Such a migration could affect pressure and degrade water quality.
Yet according to the U.S. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory “the impact of largescale CO2 injection and related brine displacement on regional multilayered groundwater
systems has not been systematically assessed.” 156
46 The Berkeley lab, which is studying the impacts of carbon storage on groundwater,
calculates that the corrosive properties of CO2 combined with the long life of injection
wells will make management of water issues an “intensive task.” Groundwater acidified
by CO2 leaks may release a variety of heavy metals including arsenic and lead in nearby
mineral surfaces leading to contamination of drinking water above health-based limits.157
Over several decades a large-scale injection operation could impact an area of thousands
of square kilometres.
Canada’s Regulation Deficit: The United States EPA, which has the authority to adopt
regulations to protect groundwater sources of drinking water, has held seven workshops
and two public stakeholder meetings on the effective management of carbon storage.
Canada has held none. Given that CO2 is buoyant, potentially corrosive and that storage
could impact large geographic areas, the EPA has proposed a set of rules to govern the
siting, injection and monitoring of underground plumes of CO2 over time. The EPA
proposes that owners and operators of CO2 storage sites must show that the gas does not
endanger U.S. drinking water for a 50-year time frame prior to the closure of the site.
Canada, which could become the recipient of major carbon disposals, has not started a
transparent rule-setting process to protect drinking water let alone groundwater. Public
liabilities for long-term disposal of CO2 largely remain an unanswered policy question.
Energy-Water Nexus: Current CCS technology will aggravate the growing energywater nexus. It takes energy to move water and it takes water to make energy. Coal-fired
power plants are among the largest users of water in both Canada and the United States
and often compete with other industries for water. According to the U.S. Department of
Energy even the most modern 500-megawatt coal fired-plant requires 7,000 gallons of
water each minute for cooling. Retrofitting coal-fired plants with CCS will increase
energy demands by 20 to 30%. As a consequence CCS could substantially increase
“freshwater consumption by fossil-based power plants.” The high-energy intensity of
CSS for coal plants may increase pressure on water availability in drying regions
throughout the continent. 158
Groundwater Knowledge Gap: More than 10 million Canadians depend on aquifers as
a source of their drinking water yet the government is 20 years away from mapping the
country’s groundwater system. A 2009 study by the Council of Canadian Academics
concluded that “systematic water data collection has failed to keep pace with demands of
land development,” and that Canadians treat the resource as “out of sight, out of mind”.
The report noted that the potential risks of CCS to groundwater included migration of
CO2 into “shallow aquifers and resulting changes in the groundwater chemistry and
overall water chemistry.” We will be ramping up large-scale CCS before our national
groundwater-mapping project is complete in 20 years.
Water Shortages: Saline aquifers could hold up to 3,900 billion tonnes of carbon
dioxide. But the assumption that all these briny waters are best suited for carbon disposal
may be premature. Increasing demand for groundwater in the United States may force
some utilities and regulators to eventually pump and treat brine water. In areas facing
water scarcity, the demands for climate change mitigation and need for drinking or
irrigation water may conflict. Saline aquifers may also contain lithium, a key component
of high-tech batteries.
47 Uncertainties: Many scientists agree that CCS is neither a silver bullet nor a panacea for
climate change. Just because carbon dioxide has stayed underground in deep saline
aquifers for millions of years does not mean human-designed systems will be as safe or
as secure. “There are fundamental things that we don’t understand like where will this
stuff go and how will it stay in the subsurface,” notes University of Toronto researcher
Barbara Sherwood Lollar. “And so it’s really important that we know rather than
guess.”159
Public support and skepticism: As we have seen in Germany, public support is vital
and skepticism is deadly for CCS projects. Public interest will grow in North America as
pilot projects get underway with huge sums of taxpayers’ dollars but with no guarantee of
success. As proponents and opponents of CCS argue over risk versus reward, the average
person will look to experts and leaders they trust for guidance. In Canada, few scientists
are more trusted than Dr. David Suzuki160 – and he is no fan of CCS. “It is being used as
the excuse for not doing anything,” said Dr. Suzuki in an interview.161 He compares CCS
to dead-end, dangerous or destructive practices of the past, including widespread
spraying of DDT, false hopes raised by nuclear fusion, and the dumping of nerve gas and
other toxins into the oceans. “CCS is exactly the same thing based on the observation that
when you pump carbon dioxide into the ground you can squeeze a little more oil out of a
depleting well and low-and-behold the carbon doesn’t come back out. What’s it doing
down there? … How long will it stay down? We have no idea.”162
Alternatives: Many economic alternatives to CCS exist but to date they have received
little attention. They include the systematic reduction of fossil fuel consumption,
improved energy efficiency, the control of fugitive emissions or leaks from the energy
industry, a dedicated carbon tax, and the protection and restoration of important carbon
sinks such as forests, grasslands and peat bogs. Technologies that capture carbon from
the air or convert CO2 to formic acid may also prove to be more economic than CCS.163
The Bottom Line: Given the paucity of groundwater information in Canada and lack of
national water standards, the push to accelerate CCS could pose real risks to our
groundwater resources. In sum, the marriage of a brave new technology with a political
fix for an immediate climate problem could have negative long-term consequences for
Canadian taxpayers and water drinkers without stabilizing the climate. To move forward
on the sequestration of billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide in underground saline
aquifers without strong regulations, clear liability, effective oversight, sound science and
a transparent decision-making process would be sheer folly.
48 QUOTABLE QUOTES "The amount of oil we consume in one day might be similar to the amount of
CO2 we'll have to handle daily.” Howard Herzog, senior research engineer at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.164
“If that makes a power plant ‘capture-ready’ Mr. Chairman, then my driveway
is ‘Ferrari-ready.’ We should not be investing today in coal plants at more
than a billion dollars apiece with nothing more than a hope that some kind of
capture system will turn up. We would not get on a plane to a destination if the
pilot told us there was no landing site but options were being researched”
David G. Hawkins, Natural Resources Defense Council testifying before U.S.
Senate hearing. 165
“You’d think we would have learned from the past that we shouldn’t rush to
apply new technologies before we know what the long-term effects will be.
Carbon capture and storage may be worth studying, but the technology’s
potential should not be used as an excuse for the oil and coal industries to
avoid reducing their emissions and investing in renewable energy. After all, we
know that energy conservation and renewable energy will yield immediate
effects of a cleaner environment. We don’t know what carbon capture and
storage will cost, when it will be commercially viable, or what it will do, other
than perhaps to give us a way to keep relying on finite and polluting sources of
energy.” Canadian scientist, David Suzuki. 166
49 APPENDIX A HOW PREPARED ARE WE FOR LARGE SCALE CARBON CAPTURE AND STORAGE? This chart provides a comparison of key legal and governance issues relating to carbon capture and storage in underground saline aquifers. In the United States, much of the jurisdiction for CCS and drinking water is federal; in Canada, much of the jurisdiction lies with the provinces. ISSUE US ALBERTA SASK Have there been public hearings into CCS and groundwater? Yes167 No168 No169 Is there a specific well classification for large‐scale carbon sequestration? Yes170 No171 No172 Have transparent regulations been developed for geological storage of CO2? Yes173 No174 No175 Have long‐term liability and property rights been defined? 176 No No No 50 ENDNOTES 1
Renata D'Aliesio. “The high cost of carbon capture: Everybody wants to curb
emissions, but are consumers willing to pay the price?”. Calgary Herald, November 17,
2008. See http://www2.canada.com/calgaryherald/news/story.html?id=175d7399-957a4282-8571-b8be43bc5c17
The issues of water use and energy will be dealt with in detail later in the paper.
2
False Hope, a Greenpeace report. See:
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/press/reports/false-hope
3
IPCC. Fourth Assessment Report Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report Summary for
Policymakers.
4
United States Energy Information Administration. International Energy Outlook, May
2009. See http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/ieo/highlights.html
5
IPCC Fourth Assessment Report.
6
Paul Komor. Wind and Solar Electricity: challenges and opportunities. Prepared for the
Pew Center on Global Climate Change. University of Colorado at Boulder
June 2009. “These cost estimates are uncertain, but the available evidence suggests that
transmission and variability management would increase the cost of wind electricity by
roughly 20 percent. This would make wind electricity generally more expensive than that
from natural gas, but in many cases still less expensive than that from new nuclear or coal
with carbon capture and storage (CCS) power plants. However, the relative cost of wind
power and electricity from natural gas will vary with natural gas prices and with a price
on carbon.
Putting a price on carbon emissions (such as via a cap-and-trade program) would raise the
costs of traditional fossil-fueled electricity, thereby increasing the cost-competiveness of
low-carbon alternatives. A clear externality of fossil-fueled electricity is carbon: coalfired power plants emit about one metric ton (tonne) of CO2/MWh, and natural gas power
plants emit about 0.5 tonnes of CO2/MWh. Wind and solar power plants, in contrast, emit
no CO2. In addition to any policies to promote renewable energy, reductions in
greenhouse gas emissions from across the economy can be achieved by putting a price on
carbon as a carbon cap-and-trade system or a carbon tax would do.
The degree to which a cap-and-trade system promotes renewables depends largely on
where the cap is set, how much the cap is decreased per year, and the resulting price on
carbon. Putting a price on carbon makes renewable electricity more competitive with
electricity from coal and natural gas. A price on carbon could make wind electricity less
expensive than natural gas electricity, but it is unlikely to make solar a least-cost
generation option unless significant progress is made in reducing the cost of solar
electricity. As shown in the figure, even at a $50/tonne CO2 price, electricity from solar
PV and solar CSP have higher costs (levelized cost of electricity, LCOE) than electricity
from other sources.”
7
See http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Existing_U.S._Coal_Plants
51 8
Julio Friedmann and Thomas Homer Dixon. “Out of the Energy Box”. Foreign Affairs.
November/December 2004
9
Canada’s Fossil Fuel Energy Future. Report of the ecoENERGY Carbon Capture and
Storage Task Force to Alberta and Canadian governments. Jan 9, 2008
10
Tracking New Coal-Fired Power Plants, National Energy Technology Laboratory
Office of Systems Analyses and Planning, April 6, 2009.
11
The Future of Coal, an Interdisciplinary Study, MIT, Executive Summary, p. ix
12
Pembina Institute CCS Fact Sheet. Jan. 2008. See
http://climate.pembina.org/solutions/ccs
13
David Keith, University of Calgary, as quoted in a Globe and Mail webpage on
Monday, Mar. 30, 2009. See
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/article671439.ece
14
Steve Snyder, President and CEO of TransAlta's speaking on the prospects for Carbon
Capture and Storage (CCS), and the need for secure, reliable and affordable electrical
power. This speech was given in Geneva, Switzerland on May 4, 2009. See
http://www.transalta.com/transalta/webcms.nsf/AllDocAdmin/9032AC8B0A9171FF872
575AC005F34F4?OpenDocument
15
David Biello. “How Fast Can Carbon Capture and Storage Fix Climate Change?”
Scientific American. April 10, 2009.
16
David Adam. “Oil Chief: My Fears for Planet Shell Boss's 'Confession' Shocks
Industry”. Guardian/UK. June 17, 2004
17
Julio Friedmann, Video: Carbon Capture and Sequestration: Technological Challenges.
(A University of California, Berkeley, symposium), November 13, 2008, see:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-665563992926487780&hl=en
18
Michael Toman et al. “Unconventional Fossil-Based Fuels Economic and
Environmental Trade-Offs”, The RAND Corporation, 2008. This study looks at CCS as a
way to recover more fossil fuels through Coal to Liquid (CTL) and Synthetic Crude Oil
(SCO) which are analogous to enhanced oil recovery: “Yet, even if successful on a large
scale, applying CCS to producing CTL and SCO would still leave unaddressed the CO2
emissions from final combustion of the fuels. Investments in expanding SCO or CTL do
not, in themselves, offer a path toward the very large reductions in long-term CO2
emissions from use of liquid fuels that would be needed to stabilize atmospheric
concentrations of CO2, a major consideration for those concerned with the long-term
threats of climate change.”
19
Accelerating Carbon Capture and Storage Implementation in Alberta. Alberta Carbon
Capture and Storage Development Council Final Report, March 2009. P. 8
20
Canada’s Fossil Fuel Energy Future. Report of the ecoENERGY Carbon Capture and
Storage Task Force to Alberta and Canadian governments. Jan 9, 2008
21
Alberta Government News Release. Alberta to cut projected emissions by 50 per cent
under new climate change plan. Jan 28, 2008. See
http://alberta.ca/acn/200801/22943ACC446ED-ED74-6A1E-6CF263E59920969B.html
22
Richard Heinberg newsletter, New Coal Technologies Museletter/Global Public Media,
Sep. 3, 2008
23
Reuters News. “Canada panel suggests $2 bln carbon capture plan”. Feb 1, 2008.
24
Ibid.
52 25
Varun Rai et al. Carbon Capture and Storage At Scale: Lessons from the Growth of
Analogous Energy Technologies, Program on Energy and Sustainable Development,
February 2009
26
Oil Sands: Towards Sustainable Development. Report of the Standing Committee on
Natural Resources. Lee Richardson, MP, Chair. March, 2007. P. 32. Quote:
“Representatives of the oil industry told the Committee that the energy sector as a
whole currently spends $720 million a year on R&D, all activities included. More
specifically, companies in the oil and gas sector invest only 0.36% of their revenues in
research and development, which represents less than a tenth of the Canadian
industrial average.”
27
David Lundberg. Climate Change Special Report , Standard and Poor’s Credit Week.
May 23, 2007. P. 68.
28
Feb 20, 2009 – Canadian Press. See
http://www.bchydro.com/news/articles/conservation/carbon_capture_proven.html
29
Alberta Gov’t New Release (see Endnote 9)
30
Jason Fekete. “Alberta’s oil sands create ‘big carbon footprint,’ Obama says” Canwest
News Service. February 17, 2009. See
http://www2.canada.com/business/oilsands+create+carbon+footprint+obama/1299649/st
ory.html?id=1299649
31
National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) webpage, part of DOE’s national
laboratory system, owned and operated by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).
32
University of Toronto news release: Scientists tap nature for clues to safe carbon
capture and storage method, Apr 3, 2009. See
http://webapps.utsc.utoronto.ca/ose/story.php?id=1562
33
Barbara Sherwood Lollar, Professor and Director, Stable Isotope Laboratory,
Department of Geology, University of Toronto. Interview with the author, July, 2009.
34
FutureGen webpage at: http://www.futuregenalliance.org/
35
The bottle analogy was proposed at a presentation to the 8th Annual Conference on
Carbon Capture and Sequestration in Pittsburgh, PA on May 6, 2009 by Frank Shilling,
University of Karlsruhe, Germany (author was in the audience)
36
Julio Freiemann. Video : Carbon Capture and Sequestration: Technological
Challenges. (A University of California, Berkeley, symposium), November 13, 2008, see:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-665563992926487780&hl=en
37
The Future of Coal, an Interdisciplinary Study, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
38
Ibid.
39
Overview of Selected Issues Associated with the Scale of the Climate Change
Challenge and the Potential Role of Large Scale Commercial Deployment of Carbon
Dioxide Capture and Storage Technologies – powerpoint presentation: Jim Dooley, Joint
Global Change Research Institute March 5 and 6, 2009
40
Ibid.
41
Ibid.
42
Robert C. Burruss, research geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, in a submission
to the U.S. Subcommittee on Environmental and Hazardous Materials – July 24, 2008.
43
Ben Elgin. “The Dirty Truth About Clean Coal: Critical electoral votes have made it a
potent campaign issue, but it's still years away”. Business Week. June 19, 2008.
53 See http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_26/b4090055452749.htm
44
David Hawkins as quoted in article “Coal's New Technology:
Panacea or Risky Gamble?” by Jeff Goodell. Yale Environment 360. July 14, 2008. See
http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2036
45
Vaclav Smil. “Energy at the Crossroads” – Background notes for a presentation at the
Global Science Forum Conference on Scientific Challenges for Energy Research Paris,
May 17-18, 2006 (Whole quote: “A key comparison illustrates the daunting scale of the
challenge. In 2005 worldwide CO2 emissions amounted to nearly 28 Gt; even if were to
set out only a modest goal of sequestering just 10% of this volume we would have to put
away annually about 6 Gm3 (assuming that all of the gas is compressed at least to its
critical point where its density is 0.47 g/mL). The current extraction of crude oil (nearly 4
Gt in 2005) translates to less than 5 Gm3. Sequestering a mere 1/10 of today’s global
CO2 emissions (< 3 Gt CO2) would thus call for putting in place an industry that would
have to force underground every year the volume of compressed gas larger than or (with
higher compression) equal to the volume of crude oil extracted globally by petroleum
industry whose infrastructures and capacities have been put in place over a century of
development. Needless to say, such a technical feat could not be accomplished within a
single generation.”)
46
Rose Murphy and Mark Jaccard. Geological Carbon Storage: The Roles of
Government and Industry in Risk Management. Published for The School of Public
Policy and Administration Carleton University by McGill-Queen’s University Press,
2008. P. 153.
47
Stanford Report, “Wind, water and sun beat other energy alternatives, study finds” by
Louis Bergeron. Dec. 10, 2008. See http://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/january7/power010709.html
48
Illustration: Integrated CO2 Network. The Vision: An Overview. 2007. P. 3. See
http://www.ico2n.com/thevision.php
49
Illustration: Integrated CO2 Network. The Vision: An Overview. 2007. P. 3. See
http://www.ico2n.com/thevision.php
50
David Biello. “How Fast Can Carbon Capture and Storage Fix Climate Change?”
Scientific American. April 10, 2009.
51
Associated Press. “Coal-fired power plants study carbon capture” Jan. 29, 2009.
52
Carl O. Bauer, Director, National Energy Technology Laboratory, U.S. Dept. of
Energy, to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, March 10, 2009.
53
Alan Smart et al. “Water and the electricity generation industry: Implications of use.”
Government of Australia. Waterlines Report Series No. 18, August 2009
54
Carl O. Bauer, Director, National Energy Technology Laboratory, U.S. Dept. of
Energy, to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, March 10, 2009.
55
Erik Shuster. Estimating Freshwater Needs to Meet Future Thermoelectric Generation
Requirements, September 30, 2008. DOE/NETL-400/2008/1339
56
Mary Griffiths. Heating Up in Alberta: Climate Change, Energy Development and
Water. Pembina Institute. February 2009.
54 57
Patrick White. “Farmers start to write off year as drought parches Prairie land”. Globe
and Mail. July 2, 2009. see http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/farmersstart-to-write-off-year-as-drought-parches-prairie-land/article1203663/
58
Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. “Murkowski calls for better
understanding of the relationship between water and energy production”. March 10,
2009, Press Release,.
59
Sarah M. Forbes et al. Guidelines for Carbon Dioxide Capture, Transport, and Storage.
World Resources Institute. 2008.
Explanation of chart: 2.3.2 Water Use Power plants, with or without CO2 capture, use
large amounts of water. Table 6 lists estimates for raw water use at facilities with and
without CO2 capture on facilities with a 550-MW net output. DOE calculates the raw
water usage as the difference between the total demand for water by processes and the
internal recycled water available within processes (boiler feedwater blowdown,
condensate, etc.). Therefore, the measurement represents the actual consumption of
water. The majority of the water (71– 99 percent) is consumed through the cooling
process (assumed to be recirculating wet systems, described in the text box). Note that
water use for PC power plants more than doubles with the addition of capture equipment.
replenished with “make-up water” to replace that lost to evaporation and blowdown.
In dry systems, the ultimate heat rejection to the environment is achieved with air-cooled
equipment that discharges heat directly to the atmosphere by heating the air. Dry systems
reduce water use at a plant by eliminating the use of water for steam condensation, but
increase energy consumption. In hybrid wet-dry systems, both wet and dry components
are included in the system, and they can be used separately or simultaneously for either
water conservation or plume abatement purposes. Design studies have ranged from 30 to
98 percent reduction in water use compared to recirculating wet cooling.”
60
Wyoming Governor Dave Freudenthal. Speech to the 8th Annual Conference on
Carbon Sequestration in Pittsburgh, May 7, 2009.
61
The Future of Coal, an Interdisciplinary Study, MIT
62
Sam Gomersall (a director at CO2DeepStore). “Will the wheels of CCS be oiled?”.
Carbon Capture Journal. May/June 2009, pp. 7-8.
63
Accelerating Carbon Capture and Storage Implementation in Alberta. Alberta Carbon
Capture and Storage Development Council Final Report. March 2009. P. 8.
64
Dave Martin, Climate and Energy Coordinator, Greenpeace. Email correspondence
with the author. August, 2009. “I assume that one barrel of conventional crude oil = ~
317kg of CO2 (so 1 tonne of CO2 is ~ 3.15 barrels of crude oil). Then 1.4 billion barrels
of oil = 443.8 billion kg or about 444 million tonnes.”
65
Sally M. Benson. Carbon Capture and Sequestration: Technological Challenges. (A
University of California, Berkeley, symposium) Video presentation by Sally M. Benson,
Executive Director, The Global Climate and Energy Project, Stanford University.
November 13, 2008. See:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=665563992926487780&hl=en
66
Ibid.
67
Ibid.
68
Stefan Bachu, Alberta Research Council. Interview with the author, May 2009.
55 69
Ibid.
70
MIT. The Future of Coal. 2007 Chapter 4. P. 45
71
Sally M. Benson. Carbon Capture and Sequestration: Technological Challenges. (A
University of California, Berkeley, symposium) Video presentation by Sally M. Benson,
Executive Director, The Global Climate and Energy Project, Stanford University.
November 13, 2008. See:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=665563992926487780&hl=en
72
David. W. Keith, et al. “Regulating the Underground Injection of CO2: Florida’s battle
over injecting wastewater deep underground offer a lesson for any future U.S. regulation
of the underground disposal and sequestration of CO2”. Environmental Science and
Technology. December 15, 2005.
73
IPCC. Special Report on Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage, (SRCCS). Sept. 2005.
“There are two different types of leakage scenarios: (1) abrupt leakage, through
injection well failure or leakage up an abandoned well, and (2) gradual leakage, through
undetected faults, fractures or wells. Impacts of elevated CO2 concentrations in the
shallow subsurface could include lethal effects on plants and subsoil animals and the
contamination of groundwater. High fluxes in conjunction with stable atmospheric
conditions could lead to local high CO2 concentrations in the air that could harm animals
or people. Pressure build-up caused by CO2 injection could trigger small seismic events.”
74
Sally M. Benson. Carbon Capture and Sequestration: Technological Challenges. (A
University of California, Berkeley, symposium) Video presentation by Sally M. Benson,
Executive Director, The Global Climate and Energy Project, Stanford University.
November 13, 2008. See:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=665563992926487780&hl=en
75
Emily Rochon. False Hope: Why carbon capture and storage won’t save the climate.
Greenpeace. May, 2008.
76
Bonnie Lovelace. “Challenges associated with rapid deployment of large-scale carbon
capture and storage technologies”. Presentation to the Senate Committee on Energy and
Natural Resources Energy Subcommittee. March 26, 2008
77
Ibid.
78
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "The Future of Coal” 2007; p. 50
79
Sally M. Benson, slide presentation on Liability Issues Related to Geological Storage
of CO2, (In her previous position with Earth Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory, Berkeley, California)
80
United States Environmental Protection Agency Web page: Carbon Dioxide as a Fire
Suppressant: Examining the Risks. See
http://www.epa.gov/Ozone/snap/fire/co2/co2report.html
81
Dr. David Keith. Interview with the author. June, 2008.
82
Ibid.
83
Michael A. Celia. Slide Presentation: Implications of Abandoned Wells for Site
Selection, Princeton University.
84
Ibid.
85
Letter from Dr. Sally Benson et al, to The Honorable Loni Hancock
Chair, Assembly Natural Resources Committee California State Capitol Sacramento, July
56 2, 2007 See http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:us6UZu1qxQJ:www.precaution.org/lib/nrdc_promotes_ccs.070501.pdf+sally+benson+lake+nyos+h
ancock&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca&client=firefox-a
86
Dr. Sherwood Lollar. Interview with author. July, 2009.
87
Karlis Muehlenbachs, Earth Sciences professor, the University of Alberta. Interview
with the author. May, 2009
88
Ibid.
89
IPCC. Special Report on Carbon Capture and Storage, 2005. P. 245.
90
Don Broussard of the American Water Works Association (AWWA) in a submission
to the U.S. House Subcommittee on Environment and Hazardous Materials . July 24,
2008. (Broussard is Water Operations Manager for the Lafayette Utilities System in
Lafayette, Louisiana).
91
Danny Harvey. University of Toronto. From a draft copy of “"Energy and the New
Reality, Volume 2: C-Free Energy" provided to the author. Section 16.7.2.
92
From the AWWA webpage at
http://www.awwa.org/About/index.cfm?&navItemNumber=1420
93
Ibid.
94
Jens Birkholzer. Task B. Large-scale Hydrological Evaluation and Modeling of the
Impact on Groundwater for the Resources Geologic Carbon Sequestration Program,
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 2007. See
http://esd.lbl.gov/GCS/projects/CO2/taskb_CO2.html
95
Ibid.
96
Ibid.
97
Ibid.
98
Council of Canadian Academies. The Sustainable Management of Groundwater in
Canada, May 11, 2009. Section 7.1.
99
Ibid. Lines 2395-2402
100
Steve Rennie. “Feds two decades from mapping groundwater supply”. Canadian
Press. August 5, 2009. See
http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadianpress/article/ALeqM5h1hw3RfxeZrEthDLwljOPtTitUw
101
Council of Canadian Academies. The Sustainable Management of Groundwater in
Canada, May 11, 2009. Lines 1398-1401. The Council is paraphrasing the IPCC report
on Carbon Capture and Storage, 2007, Chapter 5, which includes: “5.7.4.2 Hazards to
groundwater from CO2 leakage and brine displacement Increases in dissolved CO2
concentration that might occur as CO2 migrates from a storage reservoir to the surface
will alter groundwater chemistry, potentially affecting shallow groundwater used for
potable water and industrial and agricultural needs. Dissolved CO2 forms carbonic acid,
altering the pH of the solution and potentially causing indirect effects, including
mobilization of (toxic) metals, sulphate or chloride; and possibly giving the water an odd
odour, colour or taste. In the worst case, contamination might reach dangerous levels
excluding the use of groundwater for drinking or irrigation.
102
IPCC Special Report on Carbon Capture and Storage, 2005. Summary for
Policymakers. P. 13
57 103
Craig Nicholson and Robert L. Wesson. Triggered earthquakes and deep well
activities. Pure and Applied Geophysics Journal. Volume 139, Numbers 3-4. September,
1992.
104
Jack Century quoted by Bea Vongdouangchanh. “Carbon capture and storage 'being
oversold as a panacea'.” The Hill Times. April 13, 2009. See
http://www.thehilltimes.ca/html/index.php?display=story&full_path=2009/april/13/legisl
ation/&c=2
105
Vulnerability Evaluation Framework for Geologic Sequestration of Carbon
Dioxide. July 10, 2008 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency EPA430-R-08-009. P. 34.
106
U.S. Geological Survey Fact Sheet 172-96. See: http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs172-96/
107
Letter from Dr. Sally Benson, et al, to The Honorable Loni Hancock.
108
Stefan Bachu. Author interview.
109
Vulnerability Evaluation Framework for Geologic Sequestration of Carbon
Dioxide. July 10, 2008. U.S. EPA. P. 20.
110
Rich Kinder, Chief Executive of Kinder Morgan Energy Partners LP as quoted in a
Reuters News story: “Reuter Summit-Carbon storage faces costly hurdles.” June 2, 2009.
See: http://www.forexyard.com/en/reuters_inner.tpl?action=2009-0602T224908Z_01_N02523618_RTRIDST_0_ENERGY-SUMMIT-KINDER-CARBONPIX
111
The Future of Coal, M.I.T., Chapter 6, p. 81.
112
Hart, Craig A. “Advancing Carbon Sequestration Research in an Uncertain Legal and
Regulatory Environment: A Study of Phase II of the DOE Regional Carbon Sequestration
Partnerships Program.” Discussion Paper 2009-01. Cambridge, Mass.: Belfer Center for
Science and International Affairs, January 2009.
113
Owen Saunders, University of Calgary, Interviews with the author. May-June 2009.
114
Ibid.
115
Mark de Figueiredo et al. The Liability of Carbon Dioxide Storage. Laboratory for
Energy and the Environment, M.I.T.
116
Stefan Bachu. Legal and regulatory challenges in the implementation of CO2
geological storage: An Alberta and Canadian perspective. Feb. 20, 2008 (Written while
Dr. Bachu was with Alberta Energy Resources Conservation Board).
117
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “EPA proposes New Requirements for
Geologic Sequestration of Carbon Dioxide.” July, 2008. EPA 816-F-08-032
118
EPA Web Page Underground Injection Control Program. Geologic Sequestration of
Carbon Dioxide. See http://www.epa.gov/safewater/uic/wells_sequestration.html
119
John Larsen. The American Clean Energy and Security Act: Key Elements and Next
Steps. World Resources Institute. May 28, 2009. See
http://www.wri.org/stories/2009/05/american-clean-energy-and-security-act-keyelements-and-next-steps
120
Sarah Forbes. Updated: Carbon Capture and Storage and The American Clean Energy
and Security Act. World Resources Institute. June 18, 2009. See
http://www.wri.org/stories/2009/06/updated-carbon-capture-and-storage-and-americanclean-energy-and-security-act
121
U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce. “Chairmen
Waxman, Markey Release Discussion Draft of New Clean Energy Legislation”. News
58 release. Mar. 31, 2009. See
http://energycommerce.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1560
&Itemid=1
122
Federal Requirements Under the Underground Injection Control (UIC) Program for
Carbon Dioxide (CO2) Geologic Sequestration (GS) Wells; Notice of Data Availability
and Request for Comment. August 26, 2009. See
http://www.epa.gov/safewater/uic/wells_sequestration.html
123
Canada’s Fossil Fuel Energy Future. The Way Forward on Carbon Capture and
Storage: Report of the ecoENERGY Carbon Capture and Storage Task Force to Alberta
and Canadian governments. Jan 9, 2008
124
Ed Whittingham, a consultant with the Pembina Institute, as quoted by Bob Weber in
“Cost and legal barriers dim carbon capture's bright scientific potential”. Canadian Press.
July 3, 2009. See http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/06/29/f-capturing-carbonscience.html
125
Carbon Capture and Storage: A Compendium of Canada’s Participation. Prepared for:
Office of Energy Research and Development, Natural Resources Canada. January 2006.
P. 219.
126
Robert Page, TransAlta Professor of Environmental Management and Sustainability,
University of Calgary. Interview with the author. July, 2009.
127
Kevin Stringer, Director General, Petroleum Resources Branch, Natural Resources
Canada. Email to the author. August, 2009.
128
Overview of acid-gas injection operations in Western Canada: Stefan Bachu (Alberta
Energy and Utilities Board) and William D. Gunter (“No safety incidents have been
reported in the 15 years since the first operation in the world started injecting acid gas
into a depleted reservoir on the outskirts of the city of Edmonton, Alberta. Given that H2S
is more toxic and corrosive than CO2, the success of these acid-gas injection operations
indicate that the engineering technology for CO2 geological storage is in a mature stage.”)
129
Stefan Bachu and Theresa L. Watson. Review of failures for wells used for CO2 and
acid gas injection in Alberta, Canada. Energy Procedia (2009)3531–3537
www.elsevier.com/locate/procedia.
130
Dr. Tristan Goodman, Special Advisor to Chair of Energy Resources Conservation
Board. Interview with the author. June, 2009.
131
Accelerating Carbon Capture and Storage Implementation in Alberta. Alberta Carbon
Capture and Storage Development Council Final Report. March 2009. P. 49.
132
Tristan Goodman with ERCB provided this explanation (which also illustrates the
complicated nature of Alberta’s regulations): “’Drinking water’ is only one category of
non-saline groundwater, and all non-saline groundwater, including drinking water
(generally the higher quality non-saline groundwater), is protected in Alberta by our
regulations (including Directives) and by Alberta Environment. So we lump drinking
water into the protection of non-saline groundwater. There are numerous directives that
go into technical detail about this. Examples are Directive 44, Directive 20, Directive 8
(all on the ERCB web site). But just to give you a specific example - Directive 51
involving well bore construction (including injectors) states in section 4.0 Classes IB - IV
(this includes C02) ‘All new wells drilled for the purpose of injection or disposal shall
59 ensure useable water bearing zones [this includes drinking water] are isolated
with...casing cemented to surface...’ This means that from the lowest non-saline
groundwater source all the way back up to the surface there must be cement put in to cut
of what is being injected from what is already in the ground.” From an email to the
author. Aug. 2009.
133
Sandra Locke, executive director for carbon capture and storage development for the
Alberta’s Department of Energy. Interview with the author. June, 2009.
134
Dr. Mary Griffiths, Edmonton, Interview with the author. July, 2009.
135
David Keith. Interview with the author.
136
Accelerating Carbon Capture and Storage in Alberta. Final Report. P. 50.
137
Ian Duncan, Bureau of Economic Geology, University of Texas at Austin, Submission
Regarding Carbon Sequestration: Risks, Opportunities, and Protection of Drinking Water
to the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Environment
and Hazardous Materials. July 24, 2008.
138
Ed Stelmach. “Ed Stelmach: Alberta is taking action on climate change”. Full
Comment, National Post. July 18 2008.
139
CBC News. November 24, 2008.
140
Darcy Henton. “Environment minister looks to oil sands to kick-start carbon capture
projects”. Edmonton Journal. June 17, 2009
141
David Keith. Interview with the author. June, 2009.
142
Matthew L. Wald. “Two Utilities are Leaving Clean Coal Initiative”. New York
Times. June 25, 2009.
143
Andreas Moser. “German conservatives delay vote on CO2 capture law”. Reuters.
June 26, 2009. See
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/German+conservatives+delay+vote+on+CO2+capture+la
w-a01611901278
144
As quoted in news article: “Not under our backyard, say Germans, in blow to CO2
plans”. By Terry Slavin and Alok Jha. The Guardian. July 29, 2009. See
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jul/29/germany-carbon-capture
145
David Hawkins et al. “Twelve years after Sleipner: moving from CCS hype to pipe”.
Science Direct. p. 4404.
146
Don Broussard, AWWA.
147
Casie L. Davidson, James J. Dooley and Robert T. Dahowski, “Assessing the impacts
of future demand for saline groundwater on commercial deployment of CCS in the
United States.” See: www.sciencedirect.com
148
Elsa Wenze. “Mining lithium from geothermal 'lemonade'”. Green Tech. February 28,
2008 . See http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-9881869-54.html
149
Anders Hansson et al. “Expert Opinions On Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage – A
Framing of Uncertainties and Possibilities.” and Daniel Spreng et al, “CO2 Capture and
storage: Another Faustian Bargain,” Energy Policy. 2007.
150
Michael Toman et al. Unconventional Fossil-Based Fuels: Economic and
Environmental Trade-Offs, Rand TR580, 2008.
60 151
Varun Rai et al. Carbon Capture and Storage At Scale: Lessons from the Growth of
Analogous Energy Technologies, Program on Energy and Sustainable Development,
February 2009.
152
Xina Xie. “Carbon Sequestration: Injecting realities”. Energy Tribune. March 19,
2008.
153
Vaclav Smil. “Long-range energy forecasts are no more than fairy tales”. Letter to the
editor. Nature. Vol 453. May 8, 2008.
154
Howard Herzog. Economics of CO2 Capture and Storage 2nd International
Symposium, MIT. October 5, 2007. See
http://www.co2captureandstorage.info/docs/Copenhagen/11.%20Howard%20Herzog%20
%5BCop.CCS%5D%2011-03-2009.pdf
155
David Keith et al. “Regulating the Underground Injection of CO2”. Environmental
Science and Technology. December 15, 2005.
156
Jens Birkholzer. Task B. Large-scale Hydrological Evaluation and Modeling of the
Impact on Groundwater for the Resources Geologic Carbon Sequestration Program.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. 2007. See
http://esd.lbl.gov/gcs/projects/CO2/taskb_CO2.html
157
Chin-Fu Tasang et al. “A Comparative review of hydrologic issues involved in
geologic storage of CO2 and injection disposal of liquid waste.” Environmental Geology.
February 2007.
158
U.S. Dept. of Energy. http://www.fossil.energy.gov/programs/power
systems/pollution controls/Retrofitting_Existing_Plants.html
159
Sherwood Lollar. Interview with author.
Reader’s Digest (Poll conducted by Harris/Decima). June, 2009. See
http://www.readersdigest.ca/mag/cms/xcms/the-canadians-you-trust_2745_a.html
161
Dr. David Suzuki. Interview with the author. July 1, 2009.
162
Ibid.
163
Rowan Oloman, “Carbon Recycling: An Alternative To CCS”. June 9, 2009. Clean
Tech Brief. See http://cleantechbrief.com/node/592
164
Howard Herzog, MIT, as quoted by John Luoma. “Greenhouse Graveyard: New
Progress for Big Global Warming Fix”. Popular Mechanics.” July 2008. See
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/earth/4267140.html
165
David G. Hawkins, Director, Climate Center Natural Resources Defense Council.
Testimony before the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. Unites States Senate
Hearing on S. 731 and S. 962: Carbon Capture and Sequestration
April 16th, 2007.
166
David Suzuki, Online article: “Are we digging ourselves into a hole with carbon
capture?” Feb. 27, 2009. See:
http://www.davidsuzuki.org/about_us/Dr_David_Suzuki/Article_Archives/weekly022709
01.asp
167
The US Environmental Protection Agency held two public hearings to gather public
comment on its proposed regulations for geologic sequestration of carbon dioxide (Sept.
2008 in Chicago and Oct. 2008 in Denver). Another round takes place Sept. 17, 2009 in
Chicago. See “public hearings” at
http://www.epa.gov/OGWDW/uic/wells_sequestration.html
160
61 168
The Alberta Energy Resources Conservation Board (ERCB) can hold hearings into
specific CCS projects but Alberta has not held public hearings into regulations for largescale CCS.
169
Saskatchewan’s environmental assessment process may include public hearings into
specific projects but the province has not held public hearings into large-scale CCS.
170
The EPA has proposed requirements for a new Class VI injection well to “address the
unique nature of CO2 for Geological Storage. The relative buoyancy of CO2, its
corrosivity in the presence of water, the potential presence of impurities in captured CO2,
its mobility within subsurface formations, and large injection volumes anticipated at full
scale deployment warrant specific requirements tailored to this new practice.”
171
ERCB has “lumped” in CO2 with all other acid gases, according to Dr. Tristan
Goodman, advisor to the chair of the ERCB.
172
“No”, according to an e-mail exchange with Bruce Wilhelm, manager of Enhanced
Oil Recovery, Saskatchewan Ministry of Energy and Resources.
173
The EPA Office of Groundwater and Drinking Water has a webpage for the public
clearly explaining geologic sequestration via background, regulatory development,
webcasts and stakeholder workshops. See
http://www.epa.gov/OGWDW/uic/wells_sequestration.html
174
As the Alberta Carbon Capture and Storage Development Council points out, “The
ERCB regulatory approach to CCS development is not consolidated into a single
directive but rather occurs over multiple regulations based on aspects such as the
subsurface environment, land infrastructure, public consultation and well construction
(Directive 65, Directive 56 and Directive 51). In addition to published regulatory
requirements the ERCB can place additional unique ‘conditions’ on any approved CCS
development. Unique conditions are used to ensure that specific technical differences
from one development and another are taken into account.”
175
"The division of responsibility for the protection of drinking water in Saskatchewan is
broken down in terms of who is responsible for managing the different types of risks.
The Ministry of Energy and Resources regulates risks from petroleum, natural gas
development and injection into the subsurface, the Saskatchewan Watershed Authority
manages risk from water well development and use, the Ministry of Environment
manages risks from water treatment, toxics, municipal sewage, point sources, habitat
disturbance, etc. Health handles small scale water systems." Bruce Wilhelm,
Saskatchewan Ministry of Energy. E-mail to the author.
176
Neither the U.S. nor Canada has solved the issues of long term liability and
ownership, to which these quotes attest:
62 "A major barrier to deployment of CO2 capture and geological storage at the present time
is the absence of a comprehensive policy, legislation and regulatory framework for
implementation of CCS." Stefan Bachu, Alberta Research Council.
"At the moment, there is a patchwork of different rules across the U.S. and a great deal of
legal uncertainty. We need a clear way for CCS projects to obtain the right to inject
carbon dioxide into appropriate geological formations and a strategy for safely addressing
long-term stewardship once an injection project ends." M. Granger Morgan, head of
Carnegie Mellon University's Dept. of Engineering and Public Policy: July 23, 2009. See
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-07/cmu-cmt072309.php
63