A culture of confusion has sprung up around the issue of climate change, a culture that the small, bustling office of the University of Calgary's Energy and Environmental Systems (EES) group seems intent on ignoring.
The group’s certainty in its research was recently given a hefty validation by the federal government in the form of a $5 million grant to continue research on carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS). CCS is now a hot topic, having garnered the attention of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and inspired a competition created by Virgin Airlines owner Richard Branson and former U.S. vice-president Al Gore to come up with effective methods of getting CO2 out of the air. Dr. David Keith, EES director and Canada Research Chair in Energy and the Environment helped the IPCC draft what is considered the definitive literature on CCS. He is aware of the attention the process has recently received, but he maintains that money is not the motivation for his group's research.
“At the scale money moves around, [The Virgin Earth Challenge] is not actually very big money,” Keith says. “It's $25 million, but they are dividing it up into five parts. We actually haven't bothered to look at the rules....” Winning $5 million, he explains, would require hundreds of millions of dollars in investment.
CCS is an umbrella term used to refer to any technology used to remove CO2 from the exhaust of an industrial process or the atmosphere, transport the scrubbed material around or store it in the earth for long periods of time. Aside from the considerable engineering challenge these tasks present, Keith points out there are large political and economic dimensions to EES's research as well.
“Problems don't respect disciplines. If you want to solve any real problem... you need people with a range of knowledge: knowledge of the legal system, the regulatory system, the way a technology actually works, the way people perceive it, etc. My main job here is to build an institution in Canada that does that.”
Travis Davies of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) suggests that the industry supports such research. “Technology is key to making progress on so many of the environmental challenges facing the oil and gas industry,” he says, “not only greenhouse gas reduction but impacts on water, and land as well. We understand that the public has concerns about all of these impacts, and they are legitimate concerns. We have to do more to move this technology along.”
Keith speculates about some of the broad research areas in which the grant money will be put to use. “Roughly, the answer is three things. It'll be used to improve understanding in the public domain of the costs of various ways of integrating CCS into the Alberta economy. It will be used for understanding risks and how to manage them. Finally it will be used for understanding regulation. We need to make changes to the regulatory system to manage future capture and storage on the large scale.”
Regardless of how exactly the grant will be used, Keith is certain that CCS is vital for Albertans to consider. “In Alberta,” he says, “it is pretty important because of the actual infrastructure we have here: the physical infrastructure of a heavily fossil-dominated economy — more than elsewhere in Canada — the oilsands and the managerial infrastructure. If we're really going to make deep cuts in Alberta's emissions, CCS is close to a necessity.... If we implemented [it], we'd be talking about cutting emissions by more than 90 per cent.”
Having recently contributed to a government task force whose final report encouraged the consideration of up to $2 billion in grants for robust implementation of a CCS program by 2015, it is hard not to be infected by Keith's socially conscious and enthusiastic invective.
“CCS is important because it is the only thing that allows us to use fossil energy and manage the climate problem. It's very hard to get quickly off fossil energy from a global perspective, and it's very, very hard from an Alberta perspective to get off it and leave any jobs standing at all. Eventually, if you want to have a productive Alberta economy [in the future] and you want to manage the climate problem, you pretty much need to do this.”
