Cost and legal barriers dim carbon capture's bright scientific potential

Here, in this open field under a blue sky in Redwater, Alta., is the business end of what the energy industry hopes will be a crucial part of its plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and what Alberta's provincial government prays will get the world off its back.

From two small buildings, a zigzag of gleaming, stainless-steel pipe funnels into a red metal column — shoulder height, encrusted with flanges and gauges — that stabs into the earth.

With a little imagination, a hiss can almost be heard.

A kilometre below, liquefied and precisely pressurized carbon dioxide is injected into a tiny section of a giant underground mushroom of porous rock, an ancient coral reef so riddled with holes that a core sample looks like Swiss cheese.

"We believe we can store CO2 there," says Doug Bonner of ARC Resources, which runs the pilot project about 60 kilometres northeast of Edmonton. "It's held water and oil for millions of years."

That's the thinking, anyway — that greenhouse gas emissions can be reduced by capturing carbon dioxide where it is produced, transporting it to a central location and shooting it into old oil deposits or deep saline aquifers many thousands of metres underground.

ARC has been doing that in Redwater for about a year, using the CO2 to squeeze more oil out of a tired old field.

The potential is enormous. This one reef covers 520 square kilometres and is 300 metres thick. There is enough room to store all existing CO2 emissions from Alberta's mammoth oilsands for the next 20 years.

If it works.

A question of scale

On one hand, carbon capture and storage, or CCS, is an old technique.

Engineers have been injecting unwanted gases from oil reservoirs back underground for decades and using CO2 to extend the life of depleted fields for almost as long. There's a long history of safely operated CO2 pipelines. Scrubbers that remove the gas are already on the market.

"Many of the technologies required for CCS are off-the-shelf technologies," says Ed Whittingham, a consultant with the Pembina Institute, an environmental think-tank.

But nobody has ever tried it on anything like the scale needed to make a dent in the world's greenhouse gas emissions.

ARC's pilot project won't inject more than a couple of hundred of tonnes of CO2 a day. By 2020, the federal government plans to reduce Canada's emissions by 400,000 tonnes a day.

In that gap lurks a tangle of unknowns almost as big as the Redwater reef. And most of those unknowns have more to do with economics, regulations and politics than with engineering.

Billions in costs expected

The price tag for separating, moving and storing CO2 ranges from $40 a tonne to more than $100, depending on the source. Many in the field say about $80 is a reasonable average.

Pipelines for Alberta alone would cost billions.

"Just because you have commercial technology doesn't mean you can afford to do it," says Eddy Isaacs of the Alberta Energy Research Institute, a provincial agency that promotes research and technology transfer.

"We can't get there with current technology. We know that in the long term we really do need new technology."

The cost of CCS will close the cost gap between energy sources such as coal and more expensive renewable forms of energy, says Matthew Bramley, director of the Pembina Institute's climate change program.

Given that, governments should focus their research funding on renewables, he says.

"To the extent that we do see public investment, it's critical that investments in carbon capture do not divert resources away from the solutions that should be the highest priority when it comes to sustainability — energy efficiency and renewables."

Lack of regulation

Then there is the legal side. Who's responsible for the gas once it gets pumped underground? Who owns that storage capacity? What's the best way to move that CO2 from the emitter to the storage site?

"There's a lack of regulatory framework for CCS," says Whittingham. "We haven't dealt very much with CCS in this country."

Companies are unlikely to move ahead with large projects until those questions — especially regarding liability — are solved.

"We certainly recognize these issues are an impediment," says Sandra Locke of Alberta Energy's CCS team, which is developing a legal framework for the technology.

"It is something that we are working on very hard."

Current rules are designed to regulate taking stuff out of the ground, not putting it back in.

"It's not as straightforward as resource extraction," Locke says. "When you get a permit to extract resources, that tenure has an end date. When you put CO2 into the ground, it doesn't have the same sort of end date."

Bramley says the best way to gauge how serious a government is about encouraging CCS is to look at the price it sets for industry's carbon emissions.

Alberta's price is $15 a tonne, although provincial officials say that's being reviewed. The federal government has yet to set a price.

"We can clearly see that neither the [Alberta] government nor the federal government has gotten serious about carbon capture," Bramley says.

Stefan Bachu, Alberta's principal scientist monitoring the results of the province's CCS pilot projects, acknowledges the technology has a way to go before it's understood well enough and cost-effective enough to make a dent in Canada's greenhouse gas emissions.

But he warns that conservation and energy efficiency also take time.

He recalls his Romanian childhood, when the dictator Nicolae Caucescau decreed two out of every three light bulbs would be removed. Energy use went down immediately, Bachu says, but he doesn't recommend that for Canada.

"In a democratic system, you have to have a change in attitude. You can't do that overnight."

So far, so good

Researchers from Bachu's staff have been closely watching the Redwater project, monitoring air quality, soil chemistry and groundwater for any change at all since the CO2 began heading underground. So far, the gas is staying put.

"We tested every tool in the toolbox and we're not seeing any evidence of leakage," said Brent Lakeman with the research council's monitoring team.

In Redwater, Bonner agrees that the engineering issues raised by CCS are solvable.

"We believe that our pilot project could be ready by 2014-15 for commercial-scale injection."

But he, too, says that everything depends on how much CO2 will be available for storage — a factor that will be driven by the cost of carbon.

"What will likely be more of the question is what emissions will be available for capture and storage."

The CO2 hissing into the porous rock deep beneath Bonner's feet may indeed stay down there for keeps.

But whether the effort and expense will be worthwhile is up in the air.

How the science works

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