Trudeau is betting $12.4 billion on a plan to clean up the world’s dirtiest oil
BNN Bloomberg
Canada is staking billions of dollars of public money on an oil industry plan to transform one of the world’s dirtiest crudes into one of the cleanest. But it’s relying on a technology with a checkered track record to prolong the life of a business critics say belongs in the history books.
The tar that infuses the sands in Canada’s remote northwest is so sticky the region’s Indigenous people traditionally used it to waterproof their canoes. It wasn’t much use for anything else until the 1960s, when the oil company that became Suncor Energy Inc. found a way to refine the bitumen into crude oil that could be sold on the global market.
Today, Canada is the world’s fourth largest oil producer, but the amount of energy it takes to extract and process oil-sands barrels makes many of the region’s grades among the most polluting crudes of all. A grade called Canadian Cold Lake, for instance, released 81.87 kilograms of planet-warming carbon dioxide for every barrel produced in July 2021 — four times the emissions for a barrel from Saudi Arabia’s Ghawar field.
Under pressure to neutralize carbon emissions by mid-century while also supporting the domestic oil industry, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government has so far pledged $12.4 billion in tax credits for building carbon capture systems. That includes a massive project that aims to suck up an annual 10 million metric tons of carbon emissions produced by the massive equipment at oil sands sites by 2030. By 2050, after billions more in investment, the system is expected to capture as much as 40 million metric tons of carbon annually, enough to zero out the emissions of Sweden and salvage an industry that accounts for 7% of Canada’s economy and more than a fifth of goods exports.