The province’s recent Alberta is Calling campaign was a roaring success, and now Danielle Smith is going to renew the campaign for 2024, but this time with a twist.
Instead of luring people to move into the province, Smith wants to pipe in all of Canada’s carbon emissions and store ‘em underground in good ‘ole Alberta.
Huh?
Alberta is Calling
In case you missed it, the province launched its “Alberta is Calling” campaign in August 2022 to get more people to move here. The ads pitched “bigger paycheques” and “smaller rent cheques.” to people in the rest of Canada to boost immigration.
In March 2023, it rolled out a second round of the ad campaign.
As a result, Alberta welcomed the arrival of more than 184,000 new residents between July 2022 and July 2023.
Over this past summer, an additional 17,094 people immigrated to the province between July and September.
There are now 4,756,408 people living in the province, according to Statistics Canada‘s latest estimates, which marks a 4.3-per-cent increase in the past year.
The province has announced that the Alberta Calling campaign has now officially ended. Finance Minister Nate Horner noted, “We think Alberta called, and many, many answered, but it has taken up a lot of the vacancies. The housing market’s very tight.”
The result?
A bit of a backfire.
Rental and house prices have soared, especially in the Calgary area, where house prices are now climbing faster than in any other city in Canada.
So much for Alberta’s affordability!
Now We’re Calling for Carbon?
In a recent interview with The Tyee, Danielle Smith suggested that the best way for Canada to reduce its carbon emissions is to pipe all that heat-trapping pollution to Alberta for underground storage.
And this isn’t the first time she’s promoted the idea. At the COP28 conference in Dubai, she said:
“We have mapped out our entire basin for doing carbon sequestration, which should allow us to store up to or more than 100 billion tonnes of emissions [in Alberta]…Keep in mind we only produce 256 million tonnes of emissions a year [in Alberta], so we have ample room to be able to sequester all of our emissions, all of Canada’s emissions and more for many decades to come.”
So essentially, Smith is now “Calling for Carbon.”
Maybe it’s time for a third installment of Alberta is Calling.
Realistic Solution or Another Pipe Dream?
But could Alberta gather up all of Canada’s carbon emissions, turn the pollution into a fluid, transport it to Alberta via pipeline, and safely inject it underground?
Even if it is feasible, do we want to be the dumping ground for Canada’s excess carbon pollution?
Feasibility?
According to the Tyee, Canada’s 670 million tonnes of emissions per year are from industrial sources and a broad range of other polluting activities, such as people driving cars and farmers working their fields.
That means that the places where the pollution is being released are too diffuse, difficult to easily capture, and therefore unsuitable for carbon capture and storage (CCS).
Transportation alone accounts for almost a quarter of all the pollution and can’t realistically be captured.
When Smith was asked how we could capture and move the remaining 87 million tonnes of more concentrated emissions from industrial smokestacks across Canada every year, Smith deflected the question. Instead, she talked about Alberta’s proposed multibillion-dollar “blue hydrogen” economy where natural gas is turned into hydrogen and the carbon emissions are pumped underground.
Blue hydrogen is Smith’s favoured ‘green energy’ solution for Alberta because she believes renewables like wind and solar are ‘fantasy’ solutions.
To date, Carbon Capture and Storage, which Blue-hydrogen relies on, has yet to deliver on the promise to be the magic bullet it has been touted to be.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) said in a November report that while CCS can work at small to moderate scales, we must “let go of the illusion” that “implausibly large” amounts of carbon capture are feasible:
“If oil and natural gas consumption were to continue as projected under today’s policy settings, this would require an inconceivable 32 billion tonnes of carbon captured for utilization or storage by 2050.”
Vaclav Smil, an environmental scientist with the University of Manitoba, calls large-scale CCS “magical thinking.” in the US alone, it “would necessitate the creation of an entirely new gas capture-transportation and storage industry that every year would have to handle 1.3 to 2.4 times the volume of current US crude oil production, an industry that took more than 160 years and trillions of dollars to build.”
Smith’s “capture all of Canada’s Carbon emissions” sounds like another example of magical thinking by our unpredictable Premier, kind of like the green version of Alberta getting over half the CPP revenue fantasy.
Others have their hopes hinging on the viability of carbon capture as well.
The oil and gas industry loves the idea and has convinced the feds to invest heavily in carbon capture as well.
Ottawa just announced a 200 million dollar investment in a gas plant just north of Demmitt, Alberta, for a carbon capture and sequestration facility to be added to its operation.
Let the underground storage begin!
Other oil-friendly governments around the world also have their hopes for reduced carbon emissions. They are hoping for the magic of CCS to bring down emissions so they don’t have to transition away from burning vast amounts of fossil fuels.
So maybe… a new Alberta Calling… for Carbon might just resonate.
Send us your carbon. We’ll bury it and solve the world’s emission problems.
What could possibly go wrong?
