Premier Alison Redford surprised Albertans with her suggestion the provincial government may be ready to move away from carbon capture and storage. Her government has since backtracked on that statement, but critics of her predecessor’s scheme to bury carbon dioxide believe there is good reason to be skeptical.

“You could be fairly certain that as we move forward I think that there are better initiatives and opportunities to diversify,” Redford told a Calgary Herald editorial board meeting in early November.

Only three years ago, then premier Ed Stelmach committed $2 billion to implement carbon capture and storage (CCS) programs. It was the largest lump sum any government had devoted to the technology. There is currently $1.6 billion locked into three projects under construction in central Alberta — Swan Hills Synfuels, Shell Quest and the Alberta Carbon Trunk Line. They are all expected to be operational and, if successful, to reduce emissions by five million tonnes a year by 2015.

The fourth enterprise, Project Pioneer, is awaiting approval. Though there are rumours Redford is interested in ditching the fourth project and using the remaining $400 million to invest in other green energy technologies, Alberta Energy representative Lisa Elliott says the delay is merely a matter of “complex, technical agreements with a number of variables that need to be considered, and therefore they take time.”

CCS involves separating carbon dioxide from industrial emissions, usually from coal-fired power plants, compressing it and piping it at least a kilometre underground for permanent storage in saline aquifers and exhausted natural gas wells.

A 2000 study by the Alberta Utilities Commission (then the Energy and Utilities Board) determined Alberta was uniquely suited for sequestering CO2 in its subsurface. Geologically it’s ideal. Central and southwestern Alberta have an abundance of deep chambers capped by “impermeable” rock.

The government has made the technology pivotal to Alberta’s climate change strategy, which aims to decrease provincial CO2 emissions by 200 million tonnes by 2050. A whopping 70 per cent of that is supposed to occur by essentially burying the offending gas, rather than making attempts at reducing industrial emissions.

The remaining 60 million tonnes of CO2 is to be eliminated by reducing emissions through greener technologies and innovations, incentives for households and education. The measures aimed at industrial emitters are intended to reduce the intensity of emissions, rather than achieve an overall reduction in the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere.

Although Redford has appeared uncomfortable with the merits of the CCS program, the Alberta government says it is not cancelling any projects. But the premier has good reason to feel ambivalent about her predecessor’s CCS scheme.

To begin with, frugal detractors bemoan the enormous costs, not only of implementation but also of maintaining CCS activities throughout a power plant’s life cycle.

A 2010 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) says CCS could increase the cost of building a coal-fired power plant by 85 per cent, raise electricity prices by 30 to 80 per cent, at least double a plant’s water consumption and siphon as much as a third of its energy output. That report ended in a bureaucratic throwing up of hands as the GAO lamented the high costs of carbon storage and called into question the U.S. Department of Energy’s decision to commit $600 million to CCS in 2009, but admitted no other known technology can prevent anywhere near as much CO2 from entering the atmosphere.

Meanwhile, environmentally minded opponents point out that by putting greenhouse gases out of sight we are perpetuating our dependence on fossil fuels.

A 2009 Pembina Institute position paper supports the use of CCS in Canada only on the conditions that the technology is accompanied by comprehensive regulations, primary polluters shoulder the majority of the financial burden and energy-efficiency projects are not forgotten.

Another concern is the consequences of CO2 leaking from the storage site. Dr. David Keith is one of the world’s leading CCS experts. He taught at the University of Calgary for seven years while serving as the director of the university’s Institute for Sustainable Energy, Environment and Economy. He currently teaches physics at Harvard’s School of Engineering.

Keith doesn’t believe fear of large-scale disaster in CCS is well-founded. As an asphyxiant, carbon dioxide has the potential to suffocate if it leaks into an enclosed space, like a basement. But, he says, that is an improbable scenario, one which scientists know how to mitigate.

“There’s no question that CO2 will stay underground, in some circumstances, very safely, for... actually forever, hundreds of millions of years,” he says.

Martin Lambert is the CEO of Swan Hills Synfuels, one of the projects that received funding ($285 million) from the provincial government to implement onsite carbon capture.

Lambert points to Encana’s 20-year-old CO2 injection site in Weyburn, Saskatchewan as an example of just how long the oil industry has been piping CO2 underground. “And it’s been going on in the States for 40 or 50 years, so it’s not anything really new.”

Additional problems surround the difference between the sort of deep CCS described in government proposals and CO2 injected into shallower depleted oil wells for enhanced oil recovery (EOR). The government points to EOR as an incentive to continue investing tax money in CCS research, as the province stands to collect billions in royalties from oil that can only be dislodged by injecting CO2 into wells at the end of their lives. However, those wells may not be able to contain CO2 as well as the deep aquifers selected for CCS.

Simon Dyer of the Pembina Institute says the government must hold EOR wells to the same standards as other sequestration sites if they are to be used for CCS.

Dr. Keith sympathizes with the public’s worries, but argues that if people are sincerely interested in climate change, they must weigh the risks of allowing CO2 to continue to enter the atmosphere against the potential risks of sequestering it.

“Coal-fired power currently kills about 20,000 people a year in North America,” he says. “If you use CCS on 30 per cent of the coal plants... and you do that for 50 years, you would have some dangers with CCS, but you might end up with injuring or killing, say, tens of people in one big accident.”

As for the contention that sequestration allows us to use fossil fuels unabated, Keith suggests that demanding we abandon fossil fuels now is unrealistic.

“That statement betrays a kind of a sensible view that we should really go for technologies that completely break ourselves away from the fossil fuel infrastructure, and if they’re cheap and effective, we should do that. The problem is we don’t really have that many.” He supports wind, solar and nuclear alternatives, but asserts those energy solutions are truly in their infancy. For now, CCS presents its own problems, but it is the best stopgap solution we have, he says.

“If the problem was putting carbon in the air, then you’ve dealt with the problem.”