New head of Alberta oilsands group wants clarity from Poilievre on industrial carbon pricing

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre needs to clarify where he stands on industrial carbon pricing, says the new head of a major oilsands group that aims to bring the industry's emissions to net-zero largely through the potential construction of a massive carbon-capture project that relies on carbon credits.

"I think it would be very helpful for him to provide greater clarity on that," Derek Evans said this week in an interview on the CBC podcast West of Centre.

Poilievre has vowed, loudly and repeatedly, that he would scrap the consumer-level carbon tax if his party wins the next federal election. But he has been evasive as to his position on the federally mandated carbon price for industrial-scale emitters.

"The advice I would give Pierre Poilievre is carbon policy is going to be absolutely critical to maintain our standing on the world stage," Evans said.

"We're a leader in technology. We should take the opportunity to expand our technology base inside of this and he should be as supportive as he possibly can of that."

Evans is a former CEO of MEG Energy and was recently appointed executive chair of the Pathways Alliance, a consortium of major oilsands companies that represent about 95 per cent of oilsands production.

The group has vowed to bring the industry's massive carbon footprint down to net-zero by 2050.

Reaching that goal will be an enormous undertaking.

The emissions from Alberta's oilsands totalled 84 megatonnes in 2022.

That's more than the 79 megatonnes emitted by the activities of every industry in Quebec and all nine million of its people. If Alberta's oilsands industry were a province, it would be the second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases in Canada, behind only Ontario.

The oilsands are also continuing to grow, both in terms of emissions and output. New records for oil production are being set nearly monthly, and the pace is only expected to accelerate now that the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion has been completed.

So how does the Pathways Alliance propose curbing these enormous emissions and eventually zeroing them out? By capturing, compressing and compartmentalizing the greenhouse gases deep underground.

The consortium's flagship proposal is to do this on a massive scale, with a 400-kilometre pipeline linking more than 20 facilities to a "carbon storage hub" in northeastern Alberta. Evans said the plan is to have this multi-billion project sequester 40 megatonnes of greenhouse gas annually, once it's fully operational in 2050.

For context: Canada's latest national emissions inventory shows that, as of 2022, the entire country had captured and stored a grand total of 7.2 megatonnes of carbon dioxide — since 2017. Most of that was captured by Shell Canada's Quest facility north of Edmonton.