Alberta reduced pollution payments for top-emitting oil sands site for 3 years: docs
Global News
From 2018 to 2020, Alberta lowered Canadian Natural Resources Ltd's costs for its oil-producing Peace River site to comply with provincial emissions requirements.
For three straight years, Alberta’s government granted Canada’s most emissions-intense oil sands facility reductions in payments that polluters are required to make for generating higher emissions than most of the industry, a government document shows.
From 2018 to 2020, Alberta lowered Canadian Natural Resources Ltd’s (CNRL) costs for its oil-producing Peace River site to comply with provincial emissions requirements. Peace River’s per-barrel emissions are triple that of the already-high oil sands average.
CNRL, Canada’s biggest oil producer, which made C$2.1 billion ($1.66 billion) adjusted profit in the third quarter, is one of six companies to receive financial relief under Alberta’s compliance cost containment program, which launched in 2018.
Alberta requires high-emitting facilities that pollute more than the industry benchmark to comply, either by buying emissions credits or offsets from better-performing facilities, or by paying into a government fund at the going rate for carbon emissions, currently C$40 per tonne.
The province’s cost containment program, however, eases the financial pain for facilities whose compliance costs are greater than 3% of their sales or more than 10% of their profits, to prevent “economic hardship.”
Alberta’s Environment Department provided, at the request of Reuters, a list of companies that benefited from the program. Spokesman Tom McMillan said it would not disclose the amounts of the cost relief the companies received, calling them “commercially sensitive.”
Greenfire Oil and Gas Limited and Athabasca Oil Corp , which run the second- and eighth-most emissions-intense Alberta oil sands sites, according to government records, also received cost reductions.
Alberta’s government also lowered CNRL’s compliance cost for its Hays gas plant in 2018 and 2019.