Front Burner - Carbon capture: a Canadian political history

Episode Date: July 30, 2026

A key part of Carney's deal to get a new pipeline built in Alberta involved the creation of the Pathways Project, which he touted as "the world's largest carbon capture and utilization and storage project." Canadian political leaders, both Liberal and Conservative, have been pinning high hopes on carbon capture technology for two decades, as a way to keep oil flowing while limiting emissions. But so far, it hasn't been adopted at a mass scale.Investigative reporter Carl Meyer wrote a piece for The Narwhal about how politicians and oil companies have promoted carbon capture over the years. He joins us to talk about what we know about this technology, why we haven't seen it materialize at a large scale, and what it tells us about the politics around the climate.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

Hi, Steve Patterson here, host of the debaters, and while I love a funny fight, there's one thing that's not up for debate. The Stratford Festival is world-class theater right here in Canada. Whether you're a fan of Shakespeare, musicals, or classics like Death of a Salesman or Waiting for Godot, there's no better time to experience Canadian talent and no better place to see it than the Stratford Festival. So get your tickets now at Stratfordfestable.ca and experience world-class performance the whole family can enjoy. You know, we even taped the debaters there once, so I guess we're world-class now. This is a CBC podcast.

I'm Aaron Werry, in for Jamie. A key part of Mark Carney's deal to get a new pipeline built in Alberta involved a project that promised to bring down emissions. It's a carbon capture project called Pathways, and he was talking it up just yesterday in Red Deer, Alberta. The Associated Pathways Carbon Capture Initiative will make Alberta's oil some of the lowest at carbon intensity in the world while creating an entirely new industry built once again on Alberta.

drive and ingenuity, just as Alberta did with the oil sands when I was growing up here. But Carney is far from the first Canadian leader to pin great hopes on carbon capture. Conservatives and liberals alike have been pushing for this technology for two decades, though results have been limited so far. Investigative reporter Carl Meyer wrote a piece for the narwhal, tracing how politicians and oil companies have promoted carbon capture over the years, and what we actually know or don't about how well it works. Hey, Carl, thanks for joining us.

Thanks for having me. So in your piece, you traced how politicians have pitched the public on this technology going all the way back to the earliest days of Stephen Harper's government. So take me back to that time. It's 2006 when the Conservatives formed government. What's going on in the oil industry at that time? Yeah, so there was a boom happening in the oil sands. Emissions were rising, production levels were rising. Harper had been elected in the spring of 2007.

he flies out to Edmonton and meets with the Premier of Alberta at the time Ed Stelmac to announce some money and to announce a joint panel with the government of Alberta would investigate the potential of carbon capture to clean up the emissions in the oil sands. And Harper presents this as, you know, if we can perfect this technology, we can use it to curb our greenhouse gas emissions. we can export the technology around the world. And he says, you know, the air of empty rhetoric is over. We are embarking on this new thing and kind of presents carbon capture as this promising technology. And I went back and looked at all the different statements. And this is all in the public record. We're talking about statements in Parliament, the House of Commons, at committees, statements to the press.

The statements I found one every year from 2006 to this year, 26, talking about the potential carbon capture to lower emissions, the potential of us to be a world leader in this technology and to export it. Carbon capture and storage has the potential to help us balance our need for energy with our duty to protect the environment. This is the way the world is going. We are seeing it with global investment flows. We're seeing it with the opportunities to create new technologies and solutions that the world desperately needs.

All the while, emissions in the oil sands have been climbing and climbing. They were at 40 million tons a year in 2007 when Harper spoke. They're now at 92 million tons in 2024, the most recent data. But meanwhile, the ability of us to capture carbon has never gone beyond a few million tons per year. And you can actually look at our national inventory report out of Environment Canada that says we have captured a total of 68 million tons of emissions over 24 years. So from 2000 to 2024. Oillands are emitting much more than that over one year. So it adds much more than we've ever taken away over almost a quarter century.

Before we get too far down the road, we should probably define our terms. Just briefly, what is carbon capture and storage? So carbon capture and storage is technology that sucks carbon dioxide out of an exhaust stream. So if you can imagine an oil and gas facility that's producing carbon dioxide exhaust, this technology captures it before it enters the atmosphere and does something with it. So either it's used by the industry for other industrial applications. A common one is to inject it back into the ground to try to get more oil out. or you can inject it into reservoirs and try to store it. A project off BC's coast is turning to a familiar friend

to help remove carbon dioxide from the air by capturing the greenhouse gas and injecting it into ocean rock. Engineers are looking at a region 300 kilometers off the coast of Vancouver Island with a capacity to hold 15 to 20 years worth of emissions. There are other applications for carbon, but that's what we're talking about when we're using carbon capture in the oil sands in the oil and gas industry. And the political interest in this, as you say,

it wasn't just a kind of passing fancy. There was a sustained push, as you mentioned, by various members of the Harper government over the years, to develop and adopt this technology to promote it. Why do you think it was important to them, politically, practically? Emissions have been rising pretty much every year, as I mentioned, and the oil and gas industry, in particular the oil sands has been a big contributor to exports and to the economy and to

particularly, you know, royalties in Alberta. And it's appealing to envision a technology that can help us remove the emissions, remove the bad stuff while still being able to do the good stuff. There are other ways of limiting the emissions. And particularly, we can talk about that proposal by the Trudeau government to cap the emissions is another way to do it. And then as you also mentioned, in 2007, the federal and Alberta governments create this task force to advise them on carbon capture and storage. And in 2008, the task force comes back with a report that says Canada has an opportunity to create, quote, a world leading technology that can reduce greenhouse gas emissions rapidly and on a massive scale, unquote. What kind of

results were they imagining? Yeah, they proposed that we could theoretically capture 600 million tons per year of emissions. So they don't give an precise date on that, but they do say that the implementation of carbon capture technology could be done with current technology within a decade. So 600 million tons a year, just to give a perspective, that's a majority of the country's entire emissions profile. It would. Yeah, as you say, like Canada's total GHGD emissions in 2025, or 685 megatons. Yeah. So it's a huge number. Yeah. And, you know, it's been nearly two decades since then. How much progress have we made? Natural Wizards, Canada told me that we are able to capture on the order of a few million tons per year.

They don't want to give a precise figure because they say that it goes up and down depending on different factors. But the point is it's not tens or hundreds of millions of tons. And it's not that the technology doesn't work. It has been proven to work. And the issue is scale. And do you have a sense, I guess, of why we haven't seen the results that were imagined? You know, why hasn't it been adopted widely? Why hasn't it kind of lived up to those ideas that we were hearing in 2008? I think a couple things. I think, first of all, it's expensive. The more you try to scale it up, the more. You try to scale it up, the more facilities you have to attach it to, you have to do something with all of that carbon. It's quite a bit of it, which means you have to build pipelines and storage facilities to deal with all of the stuff. It's a huge, huge infrastructure project. Doing something on the scale

of hundreds of millions of tons has never been done anywhere in the world. Another factor is that the oil science companies themselves have told the government repeatedly that they will be able to take care of this. Global demand for energy is increasing, and the challenge is to meet this demand while reducing our carbon footprint. Part of Shell solution involves carbon capture and storage, and that's why we built Quest at our Scottford Upgrader. They have come out with proposals saying that they can capture tens of millions of tons of emissions by 2030, which is now, doesn't seem like it's going to happen. They have said, you know, we don't need other forms of limits on our emissions because we'll be able to use technology to take care of it ourselves.

So the conservatives are replaced by Justin Trudeau's liberals in 2015. The liberals obviously put a big focus on climate change, but they also still talked about carbon capture. Why do you think the push forward or the acceptance of it is bipartisan? Yeah, so I talked with a few people for that piece I wrote. one of them was the former environment minister, Stephen Du Boe. And I put that question to him. Why is this something that's been so appealing to politicians on both sides,

on the liberal and conservative? And he said a couple of things. Global climate scientists have said that we need all the tools in the toolbox. We need to reduce emissions. We need to reduce our use of fossil fuels. And we also need technologies like carbon capture and other technologies in the carbon removal sphere, pulling it out of the atmosphere to achieve what we need to achieve to limit global warming.

And he said that message has been confused with the message of using carbon capture as a technology to continue to pump oil and gas. And then he said it's a very appealing message to politicians to think of it that way, but that's sort of a mischaracterization of what climate science says. And then during Trudeau's tenure, there's this coalition. of oil and gas companies started called the Pathways Alliance with a stated goal of eliminating GHG emissions, greenhouse gas emissions from the oil sands. They recently rebranded as the Oil Sands Alliance. Can you talk us through a bit how that group or why that group formed? Yeah. So the Trudeau government was re-elected in 2019 as a minority government. And then the pandemic happened

in 2020. And then they went for an election in 2021. Part of their re-election, platform was trying to go further on environmental rules. And today, Canada is in a position to raise our climate ambition once again. Our new climate target for 2030 is to reduce our 2005 emission levels by 40 to 45 percent. And we will continually strengthen our plan and take even more actions on our journey to net zero by 2050. and part of their platform included this emissions cap on the oil and gas sector. And shortly after they got elected, you can start to see the oil sense companies under the Pathways Alliance label talk to the government about, you know, we need a long time to prepare for this emissions cap. We need flexible rules to prepare for it.

entering into a negotiation with the government over how could we reasonably do this. And that leads eventually to the oil sands companies saying we don't need a cap at all, publicly saying that. We just think it's going to be a divisive thing. It's going to divide Canadians. And we can move forward with this technology ourselves. And when the late 2024, when the Trudeau government finally comes out with the draft rules for this emissions cap, We will create a cap and trade system for the sector.

It will reward low polluting facilities and incentivize higher polluting facilities to invest. They explicitly tie it to the promises of the oil sands companies at the time. They say they're the ones who are saying we can cut 22 million tons by 2030 and considerably more after that by 2050. At one point they were saying they'd get to net zero operational emissions by 2050. We work closely to develop what is technically feasible for the sector, but also to keep the industry accountable to their own promise that they've committed to be carbon neutral by 2050. And it's also a form of insurance for Canadians that with this policy, we will continue moving towards the achievement of our goals. And Jonathan Wilkinson, who was the Natural Resources Minister at the time, described the emissions cap as a backstop to ensure that the industry did what they said, that they could already.

do. After the Carney government came in, there was a negotiation with the Alberta government where the end result was the deal that they have now, the MOU, which commits them to not moving forward with the emissions cap. So at the same time, the earlier comments from the oil sands companies about being able to cut 22 million tons, that's now gone. Now the current deal has scaled that quite down to six million tons by 2035 and possibly more, but we don't know if they're going to use carbon capture. It might be, they say, a range of technologies. So. And I guess help us understand a bit why it would be in the interest of an oil company to get behind carbon capture, which conceivably puts an additional burden on them. Is there a financial

incentive for them? Or is that just that they know they need to address climate change and this an acceptable path. The original proposition from the oil sands companies was that they could install these carbon capture and storage network, the system, in order to continue having viability in the global oil market, that they had seen that lower emissions oil would be more and more popular with more carbon pricing regimes around the world, carbon border adjustments possibly taking place around the world. And they saw that as a path to continue. And they, they said that publicly. Another element, I think, is that they had already been using this technology for a number of years

to do what they call enhanced oil recovery, which is injecting it into depleted wells to get more oil out. So they were familiar with it. And I think another aspect you have to talk about is there have been evidence collected that the industry has used it as a shield to portray themselves as doing something about their carbon pollution. I'm thinking of a congressional investigation a few years ago that talked about how oil companies were talking about carbon capture publicly as a way to reduce emissions. And then behind closed doors, they were talking about it as a way to continue having social license. And we continue to see evidence of that.

There was a recent ProPublica investigation that talked in similar ways about an oil company funding a study that took a very rosy look at Carmen Capture. Hi, Steve Patterson here, host of The Debaters, and while I love a funny fight, there's one thing that's not up for debate. The Stratford Festival is world-class theater right here in Canada. Whether you're a fan of Shakespeare, musicals,

classics like Death of a Salesman or Waiting for Godot, there's no better time to experience Canadian talent and no better place to see it than the Stratford Festival. So get your tickets now at straffordfestable.ca and experience world-class performance the whole family can enjoy. You know, we even tape the debaters there once, so I guess we're world class now. Hi, I'm David Ridgin, host of CBC's award-winning investigative true crime podcast, Someone Know Something. Each season, I investigate a different unsolved case. From a Canadian, woman's disappearance in Costa Rica to a mysterious man's confession 15 years after an Ontario teen vanished. The New York Times calls SKS a consistently rigorous and intelligent gem,

and the Guardian raves that you'll hang on every word. Find someone knows something wherever you get your podcasts. So we've already talked about this a bit, but to get back to the present, Carney made the Pathways project a condition of getting a new pipeline built as part of the with Alberta. Earlier this month, he reached an agreement with the Oil Sands Alliance. The government of Canada, the government of Alberta, and the Oil Sands Alliance have now agreed on the terms to launch the Pathways Project, the world's largest carbon capture and utilization and storage project. What is this project now promising to achieve? It's part of a commitment to cut six million tons per year with carbon capture by 2035.

and 60 million tons by 2045 using what they call a range of technology. So it's unclear how much carbon capture will be used with that. So for some perspective, the Canadian Climate Institute says that the rise in emissions that will happen because of the new oil to put into the new pipeline will be 20 million tons per year. So it's not even offsetting that. And then you have to consider, you know, they're talking about expanding the, Trans Mountain Pipeline, which was already twinned. There are other pipelines that are being discussed or enhancements to them that could increase emissions there. And this is all oil. There's also LNG facilities and that whole side of

the story that will also increase emissions. So there's also been this question about cost. The project was initially supposed to cost $16.5 billion, but now we're hearing it could be between $20 and $30 billion. Do we have a sense at this point of how much of that will be publicly funded? We don't have a sense specifically. I think you can say for sure that there'll be a considerable amount. Let's talk about the obvious things first. There's the tax benefit for carbon capture.

That is 50% for the equipment and then 37% for related sort of transport equipment. The current government extended that to 2035. And they also expanded it to allow companies to use it for enhanced oil production. In other words, to get more out of the ground. So you could see that as a subsidy. There are other elements like the oil pilot itself. There's a question of how much public financing move on to that, too. It's being there's a Crown Corporation that's heavily involved with that.

There's a private company that has made a non-binding commitment to hold a minority. state. And the government has also sort of left the door open to other financial incentives or help. I think you can say significant taxpayer involvement. We just don't know how much. And on the political side, the current conservative leader Pierre Pollyev, who was a minister in the Harper government, which, as we've now gone over, was fairly supportive of carbon capture. He has had some recent comments, prompted, I believe, by a question from you. What has he said? And I guess, How do you interpret those comments? Yeah.

Soon after he became leader, after 2022, he was quite vocal in the House of Commons about pushing the government. This was the Trudeau government at the time to support carbon capture in the oil and gas industry more. He asked the government to throw their support behind it more. We have to focus on technology and not taxes. First and foremost, we have to take back control of our economy. And he has since flipped. And it was about the time after the Carney government talked about the MOU with Alberta, he's now described it as a money-losing proposition.

He wants Alberta to spend $20 billion on a money-losing carbon capture project that has never been proven anywhere as a condition for building the actual pipeline. And so I asked him why he flipped, and he said he only sees value in carbon capture if it's used to extract more oil. And he said, other than that, he described it as just putting air back into the ground. And how is it going to make money, he said. So we've covered fairly quickly now 20 years of the promise and reality of carbon capture and the distance between those two things.

But I guess we should say, the Climate Institute has written that, quote, carbon capture could play a crucial role in decarbonizing the heavy industry and oil and gas sectors, unquote. In its modeling some form of carbon capture had a role to play in getting candidate to net zero by 2050, though there was a pretty wide range of possibilities, accounting for somewhere between 1 and 29% of emissions. Between investment tax credits, carbon pricing, and other policies, the government was also shoring up the business case for this technology, the Institute noted. So despite everything we've covered here, is it still possible that carbon capture plays a role in the path going forward? Oh, yes. Like I said, it's a tremendous infrastructure undertaking. We're talking about a scale, I think, that is quite frankly, hard to imagine 92 million tons a year coming out of just the oil sands. That's not even the whole oil and gas industry is just a tremendous amount to try to capture. It is just a lot of. logically easier to stop the stuff coming out of those exhaust streams in the first place than it is to try to capture it in between the exhaust and the atmosphere.

And I know, you know, we should mention there are a number of different factors that are at play in the current government assessing whether to put strict limits on emissions. And I don't want to suggest that any of those factors are more or less important. Canada's in some respects facing an existential crisis right now with threats from the United States and any number of other things I could mention. But I'm just looking at the history of this here and this is a technology that's never really gone beyond a few million tons. We should also mention there are other forms of this technology to pull carbon out of the air or to inject it into concrete or to trap it in rocks. that could be explored in the carbon removal candidate says there's 11 million tons of that in the planning stages. So placing carbon capture equipment on industrial exhaust streams is not the only way of doing this,

but there are other ways of trying to limit emissions. There's also, I guess, the larger context of Carney's climate agenda and some of the criticism he is facing. We're experiencing devastating wildfires across the country. while he just approved a new pipeline and conceded Canada's emissions will be higher in the next few years than previously projected. Where do you think the Pathways project fits into the sort of broader picture or the broader story of the government's approach to climate? Yeah, I think we should mention that the government has come out with this electrification strategy. they want to double Canada's electricity production by 2050. And, you know, they've talked about wanting to make Canada the best place in the world to build and invest in clean energy.

And so you can imagine all the power that we'll need to run EVs, for example. So I think there are a number of interesting goals there, but there are also ways that emissions could continue to rise based on that. So the previous government had this clean electricity regulation. that had limits on basically all power plants and coolating natural gas power plants. And the current government's approach, especially with the Alberta deal, is to allow for that. In fact, the commit to a, quote, expansion of natural gas generation. Meanwhile, sort of pausing the clean electricity regulations. The current government also has a nature strategy that they are putting money and resources into

to protect biodiversity. So there are a number of things that the government is doing at the same time backing off climate commitments that the Trudeau government has made. Do you see in pathways or more broadly a distinct difference in the way Justin Trudeau, his government did climate policy and the way Mark Carney's doing climate policy,

you know, you've been around the hill. You've also now are well acquainted with the Stephen Harper record. Within the climate story, do you think there has been a marked change in the way the federal government is doing climate policy? If you quote his detractors, they will tell you we've never met a climate target, even during the Trudeau government and all its various attempts to lower our missions. And so in some respects, you can take a look and say, well, they never achieve their goal. And so what's truly the difference here? And I think you can counter that, you know, climate advocates counter that by saying we did make a significant dent. You know, Stephen Guibo himself says the most recent report shows that the policies were actually making a dent.

And, you know, they just need more time. So I think when it comes to, for example, climate targets, striving towards the target, does that count? Even if you don't actually miss it? If you fall short, does that mean it doesn't count? or is it still better to strive towards it at all? Prime Minister Carney has come out and said, you know, she's admitted that his policies are going to make admissions rise, that he's in this moment right now where he needs to focus on various other things.

But yeah, it's a pretty night and day, I'd say, between Karni and Trudeau. You mentioned Stephen Gibo, I believe he would say it's pretty close to night and day. All right. Thanks very much, Carl. It's been really interesting. Thanks, Aaron. That's all for today. I'm Aaron Werry. Thanks for listening to Frontburn. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca slash podcasts.