Emissions cap coming for Canadian oil and gas by end of 2023: minister

The final regulations are now expected to come at least two years after the Liberals first promised the cap in their 2021 election campaign platform.

A cap on greenhouse gas emissions from Canada’s oil and gas sector will be ready by the end of next year, Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault said Monday.

In an interview from Egypt where he is attending the 27th installment of the United Nations climate talks, Guilbeault said the government is developing the regulations in “record time.”

The final regulations are now expected to come at least two years after the Liberals first promised the cap in their 2021 election campaign platform.

“We will have draft regulations maybe by the spring, at the latest in the first half of the year,” Guilbeault said. “And then the goal is to have the complete regulations by before Christmas, which is you know, record level time to develop regulations.”

He noted regulations to put a clean fuel standard in place took more than five years.

The timeline will still be disappointing to many Canadian environment organizations, who prefaced their own journeys to the COP27 talks with the hope that Guilbeault would at least use the event to put a number on where the cap will start.

The only guide comes from the Emissions Reduction Plan published in March, which set a tentative emissions target for oil and gas in 2030 of 110 million tonnes. That’s a 46 per cent cut from 2019 levels, and 32 per cent over 2005.

Canada is aiming to cut emissions across all sectors 40 to 45 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030. Environmental Defence and the Climate Action Network Canada both said as COP27 began that the oil and gas needs to be 60 per cent from 2005 levels.