Last week a retired Saskatchewan farming couple touched off a flurry of government and oil-and-gas industry denials by releasing a consultant's report that they said links a series of events on their farm over several years to leakage from a large industrial underground carbon capture and storage facility.
Cameron and Jane Kerr say the report by geochemical expert Paul LaFleur links the deaths of animals, foaming water and explosions at a gravel pit, beginning in 2004, to leakage of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from an underground carbon capture and storage facility run by Cenovus Energy (formerly EnCana).
If the report stands up to peer review, it should cause us all to pause and wonder whether it's wise to continue spending billions on unreliable carbon capture technology, which governments and oil-and-gas industry have touted as a way that we in the Western world can have our fossil-fuel-based energy cake and eat it, too.
According to the theory, burying greenhouse gases underground also known as carbon sequestration allows us to continue producing and using massive amount of fossil fuels while storing the carbon dioxide, methane and other byproducts in large underground reservoirs. The $80-million Cenovus reservoir near Weyburn, Sask., is one of the largest such reservoirs in the world in fact, it's one of the only such facilities in which CO2 is also injected into the ground to force more oil out of the ground.
Not surprisingly, the oil and gas industry is keen to prove that carbon capture and storage is a viable practice that the reservoirs will be airtight for hundreds or even thousands of years without leaking the gases into the atmosphere. If this were to happen with any frequency, it would defeat the purpose and make carbon sequestration a huge waste of money and resources.
On the online news site The Tyee this week, Alberta-based investigative journalist Andrew Nikiforuk author of the bestselling book Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent wrote that while industry officials don't agree with LaFleur's findings, they admit that monitoring of the Weyburn site has been intermittent and covers only a fraction of the study area. "Experts in carbon capture and storage acknowledge that techniques to properly measure whether or not a storage site is leaking are still in their infancy," Nikiforuk writes.
He adds, "Some environmentalists favour the unproven technology, while others say the money would be better spent on renewables instead of dead-end storage facilities."
This writer is squarely in the latter camp. Industry can do what it wants, but instead of backing the rapid extraction of dirty oil from the tar sands and facilitating its environmental destruction by supporting the continued development of carbon capture and storage technology our leaders should be throwing their support behind the development of wind, solar, tidal, geothermal and other forms of renewable energy.
David Burke
