AUSTRALIA

Column-Woodside's giant Scarborough LNG project may be the last of its type: Russell

Clyde Russell
Mon, November 22, 2021,

 The shadow of a man is cast onto a poster displaying the logo for Australia's Woodside Petroleum


By Clyde Russell

LAUNCESTON, Australia (Reuters) - For the first time in a decade a massive new liquefied natural gas (LNG) project has been approved for construction in Australia, but the Scarborough venture's structure and market realities indicate it may well be the last of its kind.

Woodside Petroleum and BHP Group gave final backing on Monday to the $12 billion plan to develop the Scarborough natural gas field off Western Australia and expand the onshore Pluto LNG plant to process the fuel.

The deal also sees Woodside merge with BHP's petroleum arm, with BHP shareholders to be issued new Woodside shares and ending up with about 48% of the expanded share capital.

Scarborough field lies about 375 kilometres (233 miles) off the coast of Western Australia state and holds about 11.1 trillion cubic feet of dry gas.

Woodside expects to produce about 8 million tonnes of LNG per annum at the to-be-built second train at its Pluto liquefaction plant, and is targeting first cargo in 2026.

The company also said that the all-in cost of the LNG to be produced is around $5.80 per million British thermal units (mmBtu), which is well below the current spot price of $36.70, but also considerably higher than the $1.85 the super-chilled fuel sank to in May last year during the height of the coronavirus pandemic.

The Scarborough and Pluto second train developments are also the first major LNG project to reach a final investment decision in Australia in about a decade, and comes after the industry spent around $200 billion to expand capacity to around 80 million tonnes, making the country the world's biggest LNG exporter.

At first glance the deal seems positive for both Woodside and BHP.

It transforms Woodside into a top-10 global independent oil and gas company and allows BHP, the world's biggest listed miner, an opportunity to profitably exit an area of business no longer viewed as core and frees it to concentrate on producing metals viewed as essential to the energy transition.

However, it also means that Woodside will face increasing environmental opposition to its business, especially in the wake of the COP26 climate summit and mounting calls for an end to new oil, gas and coal projects.

Woodside argues that Scarborough contains "only around 0.1% carbon dioxide, and Scarborough gas processed through the efficient and expanded Pluto LNG facility supports the decarbonisation goals of our customers in Asia."

It's highly unlikely that environmental and climate groups will share this view, and already they are lining up to fight against the new development.

The Conservation Council of Western Australia is bringing a case challenging the state's approval, without a full environmental review, to allow Woodside to process gas at the Pluto LNG plant from an expanded number of fields.

FINANCING

While there is likely to be ongoing and highly visible opposition to Scarborough, there are also other concerns more behind the scenes.

As part of the deal, Woodside entered into an agreement to sell 49% of the planned second LNG train at the Pluto processing plant to private equity group Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP).

The terms of deal effectively commit GIP to providing financing, but virtually all of the risk lies with Woodside with regards to potential cost overruns, regulatory hurdles and changes to emissions liabilities.

While GIP has a solid track record of investment in major projects around the globe, the involvement of private equity in a major LNG project in Australia breaks the usual pattern of partnering with global oil companies, major trading houses or utility customers in Asia.

The deal with GIP doesn't look advantageous to Woodside, implying that it was unable to find any takers among more traditional partners.

This could be a sign that LNG projects are getting harder to finance and that already the major buyers in Japan and South Korea are thinking of ways to meet their net-zero emissions targets by transitioning away from LNG.

The Scarborough LNG will also be hitting the market just around the same time as major expansions from Qatar and Russia also come to market, potentially creating an overhang of LNG at a time when major buyers are likely to be increasingly transitioning to renewable alternatives.

Effectively, Woodside is taking a bet that LNG will last in Asia's energy mix for far longer than it should if net-zero emissions goals are to be achieved.

(Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)

Ontario ignoring public's rights to environmental consultation, public info: audit

Social Sharing

• Facebook

• Twitter

• Email

• Reddit

• LinkedIn

Report found Ministry of Environment has not met

 obligations to educate residents about environmental

 rights

The Canadian Press · Posted: Nov 22, 2021 

A new report from Bonnie Lysyk, auditor general of Ontario, says the province's Environment Ministry has failed to show leadership on the Environmental Bill of Rights and some other ministries don't have formal procedures for following it. (Frank Gunn/Canadian Press)

The Ontario government has ignored the public's right to consultation on environmentally significant decisions, according to a new set of environmental audits that highlight transparency issues.

The auditor general's annual report on the environment found the Ministry of the Environment and several others "deliberately avoided" consulting the public on such decisions, though they are legally obligated to do so.

Four ministries made environmentally significant decisions over the last year without the required consultation, including Natural Resources and Municipal Affairs, and seven ministries took too long to provide notice of environmentally significant decisions in third of cases reviewed by the auditor general's office.

Even when information is made public, ministries didn't always provide all the information people need to give informed feedback, the audit found.

Under the Environmental Bill of Rights, Ontarians have an enshrined right to public information and consultation on decisions that may impact the environment, similar to French-language and employment rights.

But the audit said the Environment Ministry has failed to show leadership on that law, and some other ministries don't have formal procedures for following it.

• Yes, Doug Ford's government has a 'cohesive plan.' No, it's not for the environment, critics say

The audit found some changes were made by ministries that don't have to follow Environmental Bill of Rights and in other cases environmentally significant changes were made to laws that aren't covered by it.

As an example, the audit pointed to changes made to the Conservation Authorities Act that happened without consultation because they were included in a budget bill.

In another case, the public wasn't consulted on the amalgamation of several tribunals that deal with mining, planning and environmental protection because the Ministry of the Attorney General, which isn't prescribed under the Environmental Bill of Rights, made the changes.

The report also flagged the increase in the municipal affairs minister's powers to issue Minister's Zoning Orders — which can bypass consultations for development projects — as a violation of the Environmental Bill of Rights.

It also found the Environment Ministry has not met its obligations to educate residents about their environmental rights.

Lack of transparency was also highlighted in other environmental audits, one of which found the province is not providing timely, comprehensive reports on the state of the environment or progress on its environmental goals.

Another audit flagged a lack of timely and comprehensive disclosure about the quantity and harm of hazardous spills. That audit also recommended the Environment Ministry strengthen its compliance and enforcement protocols on polluters.

• Ontario's Green Party to propose bill that would hold province accountable on climate pollution

• The environment is the top issue for Ontario voters, but are candidates taking it seriously enough?

The audit on spills found that over 73,000 hazardous spills were reported in the province over the last decade, but the ministry only attempted to recover response costs three times, and in those cases the government only pursued half of the costs.

A probe of 30 spills where the government didn't pursue costs estimated the response cost to taxpayers at $4.5 million.

Another audit found the government has not taken enough action on diverting business and industrial waste, which threatens to keep the province from meeting its targets in that area. It leaves questions about "where to put all this waste and how to pay for it," according to auditor general Bonnie Lysyk.

That audit found 15 per cent of waste from businesses and institutions is diverted, compared with 50 per cent of residential waste, because many businesses and institutions are not required to recycle.

The Environment Ministry was dinged in another audit for failing to protect species at risk by essentially approving all permit applications that would harm species at risk. That audit found such permits have increased by 6,000 per cent since 2009.

Ontario ‘automatically’ okays permits that harm at-risk species

JEFF GRAY

QUEEN'S PARK REPORTE
Ontario Auditor-General Bonnie Lysyk.

Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment automatically approves permits for developments expected to harm at-risk species, the province’s Auditor-General says in a series of reports that also chastise the government for failing to recoup millions in costs for investigating toxic spills, and for breaking its own law on public consultations.

In an annual batch of environmental reports tabled on Monday, Auditor-General Bonnie Lysyk said the province is failing to protect wildlife from developers and resource industries. The Environment Ministry, she added, is “essentially facilitating development rather than protecting species at risk.”

Since 2009, the first full year Ontario’s Endangered Species Act was in force, the annual number of approvals for projects that harm species at risk has risen from 13 to more than 800, the audit says. While the projects are approved with conditions, the government has never completely turned down a permit because of the harm it would do to an at-risk species. The number of species at risk has increased 22 per cent over the same time period.

“We believe that the public would expect a ministry named the Ministry of the Environment to take the lead and be pro-active in ensuring that Ontario’s environment is protected for future generations,” Ms. Lysyk told reporters. “However, our work indicated that there are many areas where this is not the case.”

The auditor’s report shows that the number of “approvals to impact” at-risk species had risen rapidly under the previous Liberal government, hitting 802 in 2017. In 2019, under the current government, 972 such permits were issued. Another 827 were issued last year.

The audit also says the ministry’s species-at-risk advisory committee “is now dominated by industry representatives.”

Environment Minister David Piccini defended his government’s record. He told reporters that Ontario is the only province in Canada that is “anywhere close” to meeting its 2030 emissions reduction targets. But Ms. Lysyk has previously warned that the province is unlikely to hit those targets. In a follow-up report issued Monday, she said Ontario’s own estimates show that, under its current commitments, its 2030 greenhouse gas emissions would fall by just 3.4 megatonnes below the province’s business-as-usual forecast – well shy of its 17.6-megatonne goal.

Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government introduced changes to the Endangered Species Act in 2019. One of the new provisions allowed developers to contribute cash to protect habitat across the province, rather than mitigating environmental damage caused by their own building projects. Environmentalist critics labelled the idea “pay-to-slay.”

On the issue of protections for at-risk species, Mr. Piccini said the new, developer-funded government system to pay for habitat and mitigation projects is not yet fully up and running and therefore cannot be judged.

“Through this fund, we’re going to see incredibly impactful actions to preserve species at risk,” Mr. Piccini said. He added that development permits are subject to “robust oversight” and conditions to protect species.

Opposition leaders seized on Monday’s reports, calling them more evidence that Premier Doug Ford’s government doesn’t care about the environment. When Mr. Ford came into office in 2018 he cancelled green-energy projects and railed against the federal government’s carbon pricing scheme. While he has in recent months called for Ontario’s auto sector to become a leader in manufacturing electric cars, he has also once again drawn the ire of environmentalists by promising to build two new highways in the Greater Toronto Area. An election is set for June.

Another of Ms. Lysyk’s new reports says various government ministries, including the Ministry of Environment, “deliberately avoided consulting the public on environmentally significant decisions” over the past year by failing to post decisions online for citizen feedback. This, the report says, defied the province’s Environmental Bill of Rights. The findings echoed a recent Ontario Divisional Court ruling on a challenge launched by environmental groups. The court declared the government’s moves unlawful.

The government policy changes on which consultation wasn’t done included amendments to the Environmental Assessment Act, a move to weaken the powers of local conservation authorities and a boost to the authority of unappealable ministerial zoning orders (MZOs), which the government frequently uses to fast-track approvals of development projects.

Another of Ms. Lysyk’s reports says that the province sought to recover its costs for investigating and monitoring the cleanup of only three hazardous spills between 2011 and 2020, out of 73,000 spills that occurred during that time. Even then, it only sought half of the total $1.3-million it spent.

Looking at a sample of 30 other spills, the report says the province spent $4.5-million on staff time and laboratory tests, but failed to recover the money from polluters. (In most cases, polluters must bear the costs of the actual cleanups themselves.)

On recycling, another report warns that Ontario could run out of landfill room in as little as 11 years because it hasn’t done enough to boost the diversion of industrial, commercial and institutional waste. While about 50 per cent of residential waste is diverted, only 15 per cent of industrial and business waste is kept from winding up in landfills, the report says.

Ford government ‘deliberately’ avoided

 public consultations on environment,

 auditor concludes

By Kristin Rushowy

Queen's Park Bureau
Mon., Nov. 22, 2021

Minister’s zoning orders should be subject to public scrutiny, Ontario’s auditor general says in a new report that also lambastes the provincial government for not being more transparent with the public on environmental issues.

“Ministries are not notifying and consulting Ontarians about all of the environmentally significant decisions that they should be,” Bonnie Lysyk said in the report released Monday.

“Some ministries have deliberately avoided consulting the public about some proposals,” she wrote, adding that “even when this avoidance is legally valid, such actions to prevent the public from participating are inconsistent with the purpose and spirit” of the Environmental Bill of Rights Act.

And even when ministries do hold public consultations under the act, “they are not always providing Ontarians with clear, accurate and complete information about their proposals and decisions, including the environmental implications, and they are not always providing notice in a timely manner,” the report said. “Both are needed for meaningful consultation and transparency.”

The Star has written extensively on the Ford government’s frequent use of minister’s zoning orders — which are known as “MZOs” —to expedite developments in a manner that cannot be appealed.

Lysyk also said Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister Steve Clark violated the Environmental Bill of Rights Act “when he failed to consult on amendments to the planning act that enhanced powers regarding minister’s zoning orders.”

In response to the report by Lysyk and Tyler Schulz, commissioner of the environment in the auditor general’s office, the municipal affairs ministry said “the minister has publicly stated that he expects that before a municipality requests an MZO they do their due diligence which includes consultation in their communities, connecting with conservation authorities and engaging with potentially affected Indigenous communities.

“The minister has also publicly stated that he expects that municipal requirements for a zoning order include a supporting council resolution. As council meetings are generally open to the public, this expectation is meant to ensure public awareness of a request being made for the minister to consider making a zoning order.”

But Lysyk said that “proposals for minister’s zoning orders under the Planning Act have the potential to have significant effect on the environment. Revoking the exempting for minister’s zoning orders under the (Environmental Bill of Rights Act) would give Ontarians the right to be consulted about environmentally significant proposals.”

The report points to Pickering’s Lower Duffins Creek, a sensitive wetland that the minister later removed from his zoning order, something Lysyk said could have been avoided with proper public consultation.

In 2020, the government issued an MZO for a warehouse and other buildings at the site, which initially included the environmentally sensitive area.

Lysyk also had harsh words for the Ministry of the Environment and its handling of issues such as hazardous spills and policies for endangered species.

“The public would expect a ministry named the Ministry of the Environment to take the lead and be proactive in ensuring that Ontario’s environment is protected for future generations,” she said at Queen’s Park.

However, she added, “our work indicated there are many areas where this is not the case.”

Green Party Leader Mike Schreiner said “the lack of accountability on climate and environment from this government is simply astounding. It puts people at risk.”

Environment, Conservation and Parks Minister David Piccini told reporters at Queen’s Park that the government has “robust oversight for species at risk.” He said criticism that an oversight committee is dominated by non-experts and lobbyists ignores the talent, and that “we embrace diversity of opinion.”

He also noted the government has created Ontario’s first climate change impact assessment.

NDP climate crisis critic Peter Tabuns, however, said the government is “rubber stamping requests for MZOs” and “going ahead with unneeded highways.”

“Instead of making big polluters pay for 78,000 toxic spills they are responsible for, Doug Ford is forcing Ontario families to pay millions in cleanup costs, letting big industry off the hook,” Tabuns said.

S&P says jump-starting the hydrogen economy will require ‘colour blindness’

November 22, 2021 | Emma Davies

Whether it’s green, blue, or turquoise hydrogen, S&P Global says that the simultaneous development of various hydrogen production methods will be building blocks necessary for scaling up the clean hydrogen economy.

The research group reported that stakeholders across the US hydrogen economy in a Centre for Strategic and International Studies panel discussion flagged the need for ‘colour blindness.’

Each colour category is associated with the production method’s carbon emission levels.

Green hydrogen refers to zero carbon hydrogen produced using renewable energy and electrolysis – which is currently a high-cost production option.

Blue hydrogen uses natural gas paired with carbon capture technologies to produce low-carbon hydrogen.

And dirtier methods are often described as grey hydrogen, which is produced with natural gas without carbon capture, and brown or black hydrogen, which is produced using coal – and is the most carbon intensive.

Then there’s pink hydrogen which is generated with nuclear energy and turquoise hydrogen which uses a methane feedstock.

Simultaneous development the way forward

All these methods should be simultaneously developed if the hydrogen economy is going to scale up enough to decarbonise hard-to-abate sectors, according to California Fuel Cell Partnership executive director Bill Elrick.

“I don’t like the color scale because hydrogen doesn’t really have a color – you’re really trying to get at a carbon number,” he said.

Toyota Tsusho America senior manager Toru Sugiura said an exclusive focus on high-cost green hydrogen won’t generate the demand necessary for the fuel to popularise.

“The carbon emission component is important, but I think first, in order to make hydrogen as a common fuel, I think it’s very important that we start using hydrogen whatever the colour,” he said.

Sugiura also said it would be important to initially use various low-carbon hydrogen types “just to change the market.”

“Then gradually we can think about carbon levels and green levels,” he said.

“The important thing is to try not to move from 100 to zero carbon emissions.

“Gradually moving towards zero emissions is important to starting up.”

US already legislating hydrogen production tax credits

S&P flagged that the US is already on the way to blending the colours a bit.

California Senate Bill 439 was introduced earlier this year and would expand the definition of green hydrogen to include more clean production pathways beyond electrolysis to include the conversion of biomasses and other renewable gasses and liquids to hydrogen.

And Biden’s Build Back Better Act would award hydrogen production tax credit amounts according to carbon intensity levels – rather than method.

“The credit would offer $3/kg of hydrogen produced with 95% fewer emissions than that produced by steam methane reforming, or grey hydrogen, and between 60 cents/kg and $1.02/kg for hydrogen produced with between 40% and 95% fewer emissions than grey hydrogen,” S&P said.

Steelmakers embrace 'green steel' as carbon taxes set to rise


Ross Marowits, The Canadian Press

 University of Toronto making symbolic move in fighting climate change by divesting its fossil fuel investments

University of Toronto is committing to divest from investments in fossil fuel companies in its $4.0-billion endowment fund. U of T president, Meric Gertler tells BNN Bloomberg that this decision was made to lead other institutions to follow suit and reduce the carbon footprint in their portfolios.

TORONTO -- The steel industry is at a crossroads, with government policies like carbon pricing designed to combat climate change hitting manufacturers' bottom lines and international pledges likely to seek further concessions from companies that burn fossil fuels.

And the chief executive of Algoma Steel is hoping the company's costly investment to make "green steel" will help to insulate it from the kinds of sector-wide downturns that previously threw it into bankruptcies.

"I would never say never, but we are certainly doing everything in our power to certainly minimize, if not eliminate that risk," says chief executive Michael McQuade, who has plans to reduce the company's carbon emissions by about 70 per cent..

Canada's steel industry is currently in a position of strength as the economy recovers from a COVID-19 pandemic that diminished demand and having emerged in 2019 from a period of punishing tariffs imposed by the Trump administration.

The $15 billion industry produces about 13 million tonnes of primary steel, steel pipe and tube products in more than 30 facilities in five provinces.

Profits are soaring as production destined primarily for sale in Canada and the U.S. fetches elevated prices amid strong demand from an uptick in oil drilling and infrastructure spending. That has not always been the case as rivals have previously flooded the market when transportation costs were lower, sending the commodity price of the metal lower.

Algoma is taking advantage of the current situation to pursue initiatives it says will position it as a low-cost producer in the future.

Just three months after again becoming a public company and three years after emerging from court protection from creditors, the largest employer in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., announced a $703-million plan to go electric by converting its greenhouse-gas spewing blast furnace to an electric arc furnace.

The move, supported by $420-million from the federal government and US$306 million from its merger with Legato, would reduce the 120-year-old company's carbon emissions by about 70 per cent.

The new furnace would primarily convert scrap metal into molten steel using Ontario's electricity grid, which is largely sourced from non-fossil fuel sources.

McQuade said the electric arc furnace is a proven technology that would allow Algoma to adjust output to market demand, something that is not easily achievable with traditional blast furnaces that heat iron ore with coking coal at high temperatures. Its annual capacity would also increase more than 50 per cent to 3.7 million tonnes from its current capacity of 2.4 to 2.5 million tonnes.

A big driver for this conversion is planned increases to carbon pricing by the federal government to spur a reduction in Canada's greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon prices are set to rise to about $170 per ton of carbon dioxide by 2030 from $40 currently.

Spending more now to go electric instead of relining its blast furnace would save carbon costs, improve its ESG profile and become a supplier of choice, he said.

Still, the move to electric arc furnaces isn't without concern in the border city where generations of workers have been employed at the plant.

Suspicions have surfaced among local workers that the new technology will further cut employment, which has dipped to 2,500 because of automation. In Canada, direct employment in the steel sector has declined by more than half since the 1970s and stands at about 22,000, from 35,000 in 1990.

"It's possible that there will be very little impact if they do it properly. The problem was that they didn't consult with us, and so there's just a lot of fear among workers, like am I going to lose my job," said Meg Gingrich, assistant to United Steelworkers Canada national director Ken Neumann.

McQuade won't say how many positions will ultimately be shed but he notes hundreds of employees are eligible for retirement. He said the company has been transparent about why the conversion is needed and noted there would be a hybrid phase in which the existing and new technologies will run together and may take until 2029 for a full transition to occur.

Canada's second-largest steelmaker isn't alone as the industry adjusts to what McQuade describes as a new paradigm.

The federal government is also tapping into an $8-billion program supporting industrial decarbonization by investing $400 million in ArcelorMittal Dofasco, which is pursuing a $1.7 billion project to phase out coal-fired steelmaking at its facilities.

Canada's largest producer of flat-rolled steel and the largest private-sector employer in Hamilton said the project would reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by up to three million tonnes per year by 2030.

Canada's steelmakers are already among the greenest in the world but the industry is striving to become net zero by 2050 when global demand is expected to soar by more than a third from current levels. The steel industry is currently estimated to account for about seven per cent of the world's carbon emissions.

"When you have 16 million tons of CO2 emissions per year and $170 carbon price coming at you we know we need to address it," said Catherine Cobden, president and CEO of the Canadian Steel Producers Association.

She said the two conversion projects are part of a journey to net zero that is not going to be easy

"I think for us it's almost existential. We're living in a country that has got significant climate objectives and strong regulatory and carbon pricing mechanisms to back those objectives."

Cobden said achieving net zero is going to require a lot of investment and additional policy support from government. That includes procurement requirements that support the purchase of low carbon steel and stimulate the transformation even further, she said.

At the recent COP26 environmental summit in Scotland, Canada signed on to the Industrial Deep Decarbonization Initiative, whereby countries would require green factors to be considered for the purchase of materials, including steel.

The United States and the European Union also recently announced a commitment to negotiate the world's first carbon-based sectoral arrangement on steel and aluminum trade by 2024. The deal, which would be open to other interested countries, would restrict access to their markets for dirty steel and limit access to countries -- namely China -- that dump steel and contribute to worldwide oversupply.

A carbon-based arrangement is expected to drive investment in green steel production while the new US$1-trillion bipartisan infrastructure deal in the United States holds promise of increased demand for years to come, provided there are no limitations on free trade, said Cobden.

Steel producers currently don't receive a price premium for lower carbon steel but tighter procurement rules could boost demand for it, said Sarah Petrevan, policy director Clean Energy Canada, a think-tank based out of Simon Fraser University.

"Certainly as the market becomes more and more competitive there might be a premium offered to who could ever produce the cleanest at the highest quality," she said in an interview.

Achieving net zero will require the adoption of different clean technologies, particularly the use of green hydrogen, that is at the early stage of technology readiness, Petrevan said.

"Right now, some of those technologies that the steel industry need are not commercially available or they're commercially available, but they're not commercialized to a point where they're readily affordable."

Green hydrogen is central to plans to achieve net zero

AuthorMICHAEL COLLINS

21 Nov 2021


A cost disadvantage needs to be overcome first.

The US has launched a ‘hydrogen shot’ known as ‘111’ for one dollar for one kilo in one decade. The UK intends to be the “Qatar of hydrogen”. Japan wants to be a “hydrogen society”. China, with 53 projects underway, is a “potential hydrogen giant” in a world where more than 350 hydrogen projects are proceeding as US$500 billion is invested by 2030. Australia’s government is investing A$1.2 billion to fulfil a national hydrogen strategy, announcing A$275 million in its latest budget to create four ‘hydrogen hubs’ to generate producer economies of scale. New South Wales is dangling A$3 billion in incentives to encourage A$80 billion of investment to make the state an “energy and economic superpower”.

Similar promises gush from Canada, the EU, France, Germany, the Netherlands and South Korea to total at least 50 worldwide, while Queensland could soon be the site of the world’s largest ‘green’ hydrogen plant. Fortescue Future Industries says it will spend A$114 million initially, and possibly more than A$1 billion in time, to build the world’s largest electrolyser facility that through the process known as electrolysis would double the world’s green hydrogen production capacity. “Green hydrogen can save us,” Fortescue proclaims.

Green hydrogen is certainly central in the drive to net-zero emissions because electrolysers that split water into its two elements of hydrogen and oxygen produce energy that is emissions-free; the only by-product is water vapour when it’s used as a fuel. As well as being a clean fuel that burns to high temperatures, green hydrogen is an energy carrier and an input (‘feedstock’) for synthetic fuels. The combustible element is light and energy dense by weight (2.6 times more energy than natural gas per kilo). It can be stored and transported.

Hydrogen might be the most plentiful element in the solar system but it is only found in nature as a compound. That can be in gas, liquid or solid form. The element must be extracted; this is to say, manufactured. ‘Green’, ‘renewable’ or ‘clean’ hydrogen means the element was extracted from compounds using renewable power. The ‘green’ distinguishes these clean molecules from cleanish ‘blue’ hydrogen and dirty ‘brown’ hydrogen.

Brown hydrogen is derived when CO2-polluting fossil fuels react with steam during a simpler and cheaper extraction process called steam methane reformation. (It’s called ‘grey’ hydrogen when natural gas, usually methane, is used.) Almost all the hydrogen produced today is dirty hydrogen, which has found niche use for decades in oil refining and to produce ammonia for explosives and fertiliser. Blue hydrogen is hydrogen obtained using fossil fuels, typically natural gas, where the carbon produced is captured and stored to make it a low-emissions energy source.

According to the global industry body, the Hydrogen Council, announced clean hydrogen production capacity will boost clean hydrogen production to 11 million tons by 2030. If achieved, that would be an increase of 450% on 2019 levels and compares with (almost all dirty) hydrogen production today of about 70 million tons. About 70% of the flagged production by 2030 would be green hydrogen, while the other 30% would be blue. While most of the hydrogen produced today is used near where it’s made, by 2030 about 30% of the hydrogen produced is expected to be transported via ships or pipelines.

Like fossil fuels, hydrogen (when combined with a fuel cell, the reverse process of electrolysis) can be combusted for industrial and household use and in stationary and mobile applications, including as hydrogen-power cells for electric cars, and is especially suited, advocates say, for heavier transport such as planes, rockets, ships and trucks. Hydrogen, first used to propel the earliest internal combustion engines 200 years ago is poised to help the world fight climate change for two main reasons.

One is that clean hydrogen helps to overcome the biggest disadvantage of renewable energy. Solar and wind power are unreliable because they rely on intermittent sources of energy. Hydrogen can make renewable grids reliable because it is easily stored as an energy source and dispatched when needed.

The other advantage of hydrogen is that it can replace fossil fuels used in manufacturing where furnaces need to reach 1,500 degrees Celsius. That hydrogen can replace the fossil fuels blamed for 20% of global carbon dioxide emissions means the element is the ‘missing link’ in decarbonising the ‘hard-to-abate’ areas of manufacturing, where electricity is not suited to generating the heat required. Such industries include agriculture, aviation, chemical manufacturing and steel making.

Another benefit of hydrogen is strategic. A report in 2020 from Harvard University’s Belfer Center judged the countries best placed to dominate renewable hydrogen will be those with the infrastructure in place and lots of accessible fresh water – nine litres of water is needed to produce one kilo of renewable hydrogen. It so happens that liberal democracies such as Australia, Norway and the US are hydrogen friendly. This means western powers will be less reliant on authoritarian states such as Russia and Saudi Arabia that are the world’s biggest exporters of fossil fuels. “The reshuffling of power could significantly boost stability throughout global energy markets,” the report says.

What’s not to like about hydrogen? The element’s big drawback is that it is more costly than dirty alternatives because it is expensive to manufacture. As a general rule, renewable hydrogen is about two to three times more costly to produce than fossil-fuel-based hydrogen. In the EU context, green hydrogen costs from 2.5 to 5.5 euros a kilo versus 1.5 euros a kilo for brown hydrogen and 2 euros a kilo for blue. In the Australian context, the cost of green hydrogen needs to plunge from an estimated A$8.75 a kilo now to below A$2 a kilo to be as cheap as fossil fuels. For the US to achieve its 111 shot, the cost of clean hydrogen must plummet by 80% from US$5 a kilo.

Reducing the cost is the defining challenge of green hydrogen – that the cost of solar photovoltaics plunged 82% from 2010 to 2019 provides much encouragement. The hydrogen industry will likewise triumph if, first, electrolysers become cheaper due to technological advances and economies of scale, second if renewable power becomes more affordable, and third if hydrogen producers can achieve economies of scale. Governments, for their part, need to offer subsidies that encourage demand and supply. Another option is they could make clean energies more price competitive by legislating a tax on carbon.

While the intractable politics of climate change prevent the implementation of adequate carbon taxes, governments are providing the catalyst to engender the required economies of scale. Bloomberg New Energy Forum forecasts green hydrogen’s cost could drop to US$2 a kilo by 2030 and US$1 a kilo by 2050 by when the element could supply up to 24% of the world’s energy needs. A world looms where clean hydrogen might play a defining role in helping the drive to net-zero emissions. The split between green and blue will depend on reducing the cost of green.

To be sure, the electrolysis performed to create green hydrogen comes with the environmental challenge that it removes water supplies from where the hydrogen is produced. Doubts surrounding carbon capture and storage undermine blue hydrogen’s environmental credentials. Some dismiss it as a natural-gas company marketing ploy like ‘clean coal’ – a recent Cornell and Stanford study says blue hydrogen is “difficult to justify on climate grounds”. Hydrogen, being the lightest gas in the universe, is not dense by volume. This means it must be pressurised to pipe or liquified to ship, which adds to costs. Hydrogen is volatile and can explode. The petro-states and China could prove influential enough in hydrogen and thus negate the element’s strategic benefits for the west. Batteries are likely to hold their cost advantage over hydrogen fuel cells for powering electric cars. Solutions other than hydrogen (such as better battery storage, interconnected grids and smart-grid technology) could overcome the intermittent handicap of renewable power. Beware too that two decades ago, hydrogen was touted as an energy solution. George W Bush in the 2003 State of the Union, for instance, set aside US$1.2 billion so the first car driven by a child born that year would be powered by hydrogen. Yet 18 years later, the green hydrogen industry still barely exists.

But that’s a reason for optimism. The push to derive the economies of scale needed to lower the price of hydrogen have barely started. Yet electrolyser costs have dived by around 60% over the past 10 years, and the coming economies of scale are expected to lead to a further halving by 2030, according to the financial-sector-backed Sustainable Markets Initiative, which expects green hydrogen to be price competitive against fossil-fuel-based hydrogen by 2030. If so, the countries hyping the element are likely to fulfil their hopes for an element that today shapes as a key technological pathway to net-zero emissions.

Political shortfall

President Joe Biden, to emphasise the priority he placed on climate change, announced the US would rejoin the Paris Agreement on his first day in office. One week later on January 27, Biden took “aggressive” executive actions “to tackle the climate crisis” that included a writ that climate considerations be an “essential element” of US foreign policy. In April, Biden committed the US to slashing emissions by 50% by 2030 from 2005 levels because climate change posed an “existential threat”.

Yet in August, the White House demanded Opec boost oil production because high petrol prices “risk harming the ongoing global recovery”. While on his way from Italy to the UN climate change conference of world leaders in the UK in October, Biden admitted the situation “seems like an irony”.

Rather than ironic, Biden’s actions are incompatible. But that’s understandable, especially for a president whose climate-change steps have been hobbled by a Congress under his party’s control. The political resistance against tackling climate action has proved intractable for decades for three broad reasons.

The central political problem is that steps to lower emissions impose immediate costs and there are limits to what people will stomach. Economists (among others) argue the best way to reduce carbon emissions is to tax carbon. The IMF says carbon taxes need to rise from its estimate of US$3 a ton now to US$75 a ton by 2030 to reduce emissions as targeted. But taxes are unpopular, especially among the working class, as the ‘gilets jaunes’ protests over higher oil and fuel prices in France from 2018 to 2020 showed. Carbon taxes are regressive because the poorer spend a greater proportion of their incomes on energy. The taxes cost jobs in targeted industries. They hurt the countries and communities dependent on these energies. They promote a general rise in prices that has flow-on effects for interest rates. A World Bank tracker highlights the world’s failure to impose taxes on carbon. The gauge shows that installed or coming carbon taxes cover only 21.5% of global emissions. These taxes are generally set too low to make much difference anyway. Some say the effective price of carbon emissions across the world is essentially zero. As there’s little sign that will change, policymakers must resort to regulatory actions, subsidies and possibly carbon tariffs on imports to change behaviours – and they come with political blowback too.

The second challenge is the ‘free rider’ problem. If most countries take action to reduce emissions, there is less incentive for the reluctant to do so. (The other way to view this difficulty is as the first-mover disadvantage.) The third is the sequencing problem. Emerging countries protest they are being asked to forgo prosperity to mitigate the damage caused when advanced countries became rich on cheap fossil fuels. Emerging leaders sabotaged the UN climate conference in Copenhagen in 2009 for this reason.

The thorny politics explain why policymakers invest so much hope in technology. This is the context in which to view the promise of hydrogen. Bloomberg New Energy Group says seven indicators will determine whether or not a hydrogen economy emerges. The first is that countries legislate net-zero climate targets to force hard-to-abate industries to decarbonise. The second is that standards governing hydrogen use are harmonised and regulatory barriers removed, to reduce obstacles for hydrogen projects. Three, targets with investment mechanisms are needed to provide a motive for investment. Four, harsh heavy transport emission standards must to be set to promote a shift towards hydrogen as a fuel. Five, mandates and markets for low-emission products be formed. Six, industrial decarbonisation policies and incentives are established. Last, hydrogen-ready equipment becomes commonplace, which enables and reduces the cost of switching to hydrogen.

Meeting 24% of energy demand with hydrogen in a 1.5 degree Celsius scenario will require huge amounts of additional renewable electricity generation. In this scenario, about 31,320 terawatts of electricity would be needed to power electrolysers – more than is produced worldwide nowadays from all sources, the group says. Add to this the projected needs of the power sector – where renewables are also likely to expand massively if deep emission targets are to be met – and total renewable energy generation excluding hydro would need to top 60,000 terawatts compared with less than 3,000 terawatts in 2020.

Even amid such production challenges, hydrogen’s biggest barrier is price. Some of hydrogen’s biggest supporters admit to doubts about overcoming hydrogen’s cost disadvantage. Former Australian chief scientist Alan Finkel, who forecasts Australia will be the world’s biggest hydrogen exporter, says “in practice the future costs of both green and blue hydrogen remain unknown”.

There are, however, plenty of optimists. A study by INET Oxford released in September found most energy-economy models underestimate deployment rates for renewable energy technologies and overegg their costs. The study suggests that if batteries, solar, wind and hydrogen electrolysers match recent exponential growth for another decade, the world will attain a “near-net-zero emissions energy system within 25 years”.

Marco Alverà, the CEO of Italy’s energy-infrastructure giant Snam and the author of The Hydrogen Revolution, is another optimist. Green hydrogen priced at US$5 a kilo or US$125 a megawatt-hour compares with about US$40 a megawatt-hour for oil and about US$60 a megawatt-hour for natural gas in Europe, he notes. “What’s needed to get us from the current US$5 a kilo to US$2 or even US$1? The answer is that we need to make more of it,” Alverà says. “The potential economies of scale are staggering: just 25 gigawatts of electrolyser production capacity – globally – could bring the cost of hydrogen to US$2 a kilo when combined with cheap renewable power.”

Another cause for optimism is that nuclear energy, a reliable emissions-free source of power, is suited to power the electrolysis process that makes green hydrogen. The nuclear industry in the UK reckons it can produce 33% of the country’s clean hydrogen needs by 2050. Oil and gas companies moving away from fossil fuels are another possible driver of the hydrogen economy.

The US’s 111 strategy will no doubt be successful if it is read as one dollar one kilo one day. And there’s a good chance the day when such technological advances overcome the political failures to mitigate climate change will be soon enough.

Originally published by Michael Collins, Investment Specialist, Magellan Group

Green Hydrogen: The new scramble for North Africa

European plans for hydrogen energy projects in North Africa smack of green colonialism.



Opinions|Climate Crisis
Hamza Hamouchene

London-based Algerian researcher and activist
Published On 20 Nov 2021

Importing energy from North Africa is part of the European Union's green transition plans 

[File: Maxar Technologies/AFP]

The potential of the Sahara desert in North Africa to generate large amounts of renewable energy thanks to its dry climate and vast expanses of land has long been touted. For years, the Europeans, in particular, have considered it a potential source of solar energy that could satisfy a sizable chunk of European energy demands.

In 2009, the Desertec project, an ambitious initiative to power Europe from Saharan solar plants was launched by a coalition of European industrial firms and financial institutions with the idea that a tiny surface of the desert can provide 15 percent of Europe’s electricity via special high voltage direct current transmission cables.

The Desertec venture eventually stalled amid criticisms of its astronomical costs and its neo-colonial connotations. After an attempt to revive it as Desertec 2.0 with a focus on the local market for renewable energy, the project was eventually reborn into Desertec 3.0, which aims to satisfy Europe’s demand for hydrogen, a “clean” energy alternative to fossil fuels.

In early 2020, Desertec Industrial Initiative (DII) launched the MENA Hydrogen Alliance to help set up energy projects in the Middle East and North Africa region that produce hydrogen for export.

While in Europe such projects may sound like a good idea – helping the continent fulfil its targets of greenhouse emission cuts – the view from North Africa is radically different. There are growing concerns that instead of helping the region with its green transition, these schemes will result in the plunder of local resources, dispossession of communities, environmental damage and entrenchment of corrupt elites.

Hydrogen: The new energy frontier in Africa

As the world seeks to switch to renewable energy amid a growing climate crisis, hydrogen has been presented as a “clean” alternative fuel. Most current hydrogen production is the result of extraction from fossil fuels, leading to large carbon emissions (grey hydrogen). The cleanest form of hydrogen – “green” hydrogen – comes from electrolysis of water, a process that can be powered by electricity from renewable energy sources.

In recent years, under heavy lobbying from various interest groups, the EU has embraced the idea of a hydrogen transition as a centrepiece of its climate response, introducing in 2020 its hydrogen strategy within the framework of the European Green Deal (EGD). The plan proposes shifting to “green” hydrogen by 2050, through local production and establishing a steady supply from Africa.

It was inspired by ideas put forward by trade body and lobby group Hydrogen Europe, which has set out the “2 x 40 GW green hydrogen initiative”. Under this concept, by 2030 the EU would have in place 40 gigawatts of domestic renewable hydrogen electrolyser capacity and import a further 40 gigawatts from electrolysers in neighbouring areas, among them the deserts of North Africa, using existing natural-gas pipelines that already connect Algeria to Europe.

Germany, where Desertec was launched, has been on the forefront of the EU’s hydrogen strategy. Its government has already approached the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Africa and Morocco to develop “decarbonised fuel” generated from renewable energy, for export to Europe and is exploring other potential areas/countries particularly suited to green hydrogen production. In 2020, the Moroccan government entered into a partnership with Germany to develop the first green hydrogen plant on the continent.

Initiatives like Desertec have been quick to jump on the hydrogen bandwagon, which is likely to bring billions of euros of EU funding. Its manifesto reflects the general narrative used to promote the hydrogen and renewable energy projects. It tries to present them as beneficial for local communities. It claims it could bring “economic development, future-oriented jobs and social stability in North-African countries”.

But it also makes clear the extractive nature of this scheme: “for a fully renewable energy system in Europe, we need North Africa to produce cost-competitive solar and wind electricity, converted to hydrogen, for export by pipeline to Europe”. And it makes sure to indicate its commitment to “Fortress Europe”, by claiming that the projects could “[reduce] the number of economic migrants from the region to Europe”.

In other words, the vision behind Desertec and many of these European “green” projects in North Africa seeks to preserve the current exploitative, neo-colonial relations Europe has with the region.
A neo-colonial ‘green transition’

During the colonial era, European powers set up a vast economic system to extract wealth, raw materials and (slave) labour from the African continent. Although the 20th century brought independence to African colonies, this system was never dismantled; it was only transformed, often with the help of local post-colonial authoritarian leaders and elites.

Now the fear is that the EU’s green transition will continue to feed this exploitative economic system to the benefit of European big business and to the detriment of local communities in African countries they partner with. The push for new hydrogen supply chains proposed in projects like Desertec does little to alleviate these concerns.

This is because one of the biggest lobbies behind the EU’s turn to hydrogen represents fossil fuel companies, whose origins are tightly linked to the colonial exploits of European powers. Two of DII’s partners, for example, are the French energy giant Total and the Dutch oil major Shell.

In Africa and elsewhere, fossil fuel companies continue to use the same exploitative economic structures set up during colonialism to extract local resources and transfer wealth out of the continent.

They are also keen on preserving the political status quo in African countries so they can continue to benefit from lucrative relations with corrupt elites and authoritarian leaders. This basically allows them to engage in labour exploitation, environmental degradation, violence against local communities, etc with impunity.

In this sense, it is not surprising that the fossil fuel industry and its lobbies are pushing for embracing hydrogen as the “clean” fuel of the future in order to stay relevant and in business. The industry wants to preserve the existing natural gas infrastructure and pipelines, along with the exploitative economic relations behind them.

Given the industry’s long track record of environmental damage and abuse, it is also not surprising that the hydrogen drive hides major pollution risks. Desertec’s manifesto, for example, points out that “in an initial phase (between 2030-2035), a substantial hydrogen volume can be produced by converting natural gas to hydrogen, whereby the CO2 is stored in empty gas/oil fields”. This alongside the use of scarce water resources to produce hydrogen are yet another example of dumping waste in the global South and displacing environmental costs from the North to the South.

The economic benefits for the local population are also under question. A huge upfront investment would be needed in order to establish the infrastructure required to produce and transport green hydrogen to Europe. Given previous experiences carrying out such high-cost and capital-intensive projects, the investment ends up creating more debt for the receiving country, deepening the dependence upon multilateral lending and Western financial assistance.

North African energy projects established with European support in the past decade already show how energy colonialism is reproduced even in transitions to renewable energy in the form of green colonialism or green grabbing.

In Tunisia, a solar energy project called TuNur, endorsed by Desertec, has been scrutinised for its export-oriented plans. Given the country’s massive energy deficiency and dependence on imports of Algerian natural gas for power generation, exporting electricity while the local population suffers from repeated blackouts makes little sense.

In Morocco, the untransparent land acquisition process and water exploitation plans of the Ouarzazate Solar Plant – also supported by DII members – have raised questions about possible harms local communities may suffer. The high cost of the project – paid for with loans from international financial institutions – has also raised concern about its debt burden on the national budget.

Amid the growing climate crisis, North African countries cannot afford to continue engaging in such exploitative projects. They cannot continue being exporters of cheap natural resources to Europe and the site of displaced socio-environmental costs of its green transition.

They need a just transition that involves a shift to an economy that is ecologically sustainable, equitable and just for all. In this context, existing neo-colonial relations and practices must be challenged and halted.

As for European countries and corporations, they need to break away from the imperial and racialised logic of externalising costs. Otherwise, they would continue to feed green colonialism and further pursuit of extractivism and exploitation of nature and labour for a supposedly green agenda, which would undermine collective efforts for an effective and just global response to climate change.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Hamza Hamouchene
London-based Algerian researcher and activist
Hamza Hamouchene is a London-based Algerian researcher and activist. He is currently the North Africa Programme Coordinator at the Transnational Institute (TNI).

TAR SANDS
Big Oil's pollution in Canada is poisoning the environment — and may even be deadly


Nicholas Kusnetz, Inside Climate News
Sun, November 21, 2021
This article was published in partnership with Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news outlet that covers climate, energy and the environment. It is part of “The Fifth Crime,” a series on ecocide.

FORT McMURRAY, Alberta — The land around Jean L’Hommecourt’s cabin was once miles away from the noise of the world. On long summer days, she would come with her mother to gather berries from the forest and to hunt moose when the leaves turned yellow and the air crisp.

But over the last two decades, the cabin has been surrounded by the expanding mines of Alberta’s tar sands, where oil companies have dug vast open pits to extract a heavy form of crude called bitumen. L’Hommecourt and her Indigenous community of Fort McKay, about 35 miles north of Fort McMurray, have watched as the companies have replaced their traditional lands with a 40-mile string of mines, stripping away subarctic boreal forest and wetlands and rerouting waterways.

“It’s an invasion of our territory, invasion of us trying to be out on the land,” L’Hommecourt said. Over the years, more and more workers have shown up in the area, stopping her along the road to tell her that she couldn’t hunt moose or that she was trespassing.

“‘You’re the trespasser,’” she tells them. “‘I shouldn’t have to be answering your questions — you answer mine.’”

Jean L'Hommecourt warms at the fire outside the cabin she has built near the Fort McKay First Nation's village, about an hour's drive north of Fort McMurray in Alberta. (Michael Kodas)

Oil and gas companies like ExxonMobil and the Canadian giant Suncor have transformed the tar sands — also called oil sands — into one of the world’s largest industrial developments, covering an area larger than New York City. They have built sprawling waste pits that leach heavy metals into groundwater and processing plants that spew pollutants into the air, sending a sour stench for miles.

The mines’ ecological impacts are so vast and so deep that L’Hommecourt and other Indigenous people here — mostly from the Dene and Cree First Nations — say the industry has challenged their very existence, even as it has provided jobs and revenue to Native businesses and communities. People in this region have long suspected that the tar sands mines were poisoning the land and everything it feeds.

The economic benefits of the development are immense: Oil is Canada’s top export, and the mining and energy sector as a whole accounts for nearly a quarter of Alberta’s provincial economy. The sands pump out more than 3 million barrels of oil per day, helping make Canada the world’s fourth-largest oil producer and the top exporter of crude to the U.S. But the companies’ energy-hungry extraction has also made the oil and gas sector Canada’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, according to a government report.

The largest oil sands companies have pledged to reduce their emissions, saying they will rely largely on government-subsidized carbon capture projects. Yet oil companies and the government expect output will climb well into the 2030s. Even a new proposal by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to cap emissions in the oil sector does not include any plan to lower production.

Some lawyers and advocates have pointed to the tar sands as a prime example of the widespread environmental destruction they call “ecocide.” They are pushing the International Criminal Court to outlaw ecocide as a crime, on par with genocide or war crimes. While the campaign for a new international law is likely to last years, with no assurance that it will succeed, it has drawn attention to the inability of countries’ laws to contain industrial development like the tar sands, which will pollute the land for decades or centuries.

Mike Mercredi, who is Dene and lives in Fort Chipewyan, about 100 miles north of Fort McKay, noted that the name of his people translates as “people of the land.”

“It’s in our name of who we call ourselves,” he said. “We are the land. So when you’re destroying that land, when you’re committing ecocide, you’re committing genocide.”

Julie King, an Exxon spokeswoman, said, “ExxonMobil is committed to operating our businesses in a responsible and sustainable manner, working to minimize environmental impacts and supporting the communities where we live and work.”

Leithan Slade, a spokesman for Suncor, pointed to agreements the company has signed with First Nations, adding that “Suncor sees partnering with Indigenous communities as foundational to successful energy development.”

L’Hommecourt is intimately familiar with the partnerships through her work as an environmental coordinator and researcher for the Fort McKay First Nation, of which she is a member, and in that position she has fought to protect whatever shreds of land she could.

Her cabin is only 20 miles from town as the crow flies, but the drive takes more than an hour, because the road has to loop around several mines. The land, she said, is where she can think in her language, Dene, “where in the outside world it’s all English.”

“You get that sense of belonging here,” she said, “and that’s what I want for our peoples, to have their land back.” She added, “If you have your land back, you have everything.”
The tar sands

The only way to fully appreciate the scope of the tar sands is to see the mines from the air. Flying across the region from the north, the twisting channels of the Peace-Athabasca Delta dominate the landscape, snaking through forest and marshlands with not a road or a power line in sight.

The terrain gives way to a mixture of forest, muskeg and drylands, where the sandy soil rises to the surface. Out of nowhere, straight lines emerge — a wide, unpaved highway and paths leading to squares carved out of the forest, where companies have explored for oil.

Then the mines come into view. Billowing plumes of smoke fill the sky. Flames shoot out of flare stacks. The forest’s green is replaced by vast black holes pockmarked with giant puddles. From the air, the dump trucks and the shovels look like toys, hauling mounds of bitumen from newly dug pits. As the plane nears its descent, the cabin fills with a tarry stench.

“It’s just the most completely ludicrous approach to industrial and energy development that is possible, given everything we know about the impact on ecosystems, the impact on climate,” said Dale Marshall, the national program manager for Environmental Defence, a Canadian advocacy group.

To extract bitumen from the sand, oil companies heat it and then treat it in a slurry of water and solvents. In other parts of Alberta, where the sands are too deep to mine, the bitumen is melted in place and extracted through wells by pumping high-pressure steam underground. The deeper deposits cover a much larger area than the mines, more than 50,000 square miles.

The Syncrude Operation north of Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada. (Michael Kodas)

The extraction requires enormous amounts of energy: In 2018, the latest year for which figures are available, oil sands producers consumed 30 percent of all the natural gas burned in Canada. Collectively, the mines’ and deep-extraction projects’ greenhouse gas emissions about equal those of 21 coal-fired power plants, and that’s just to get the crude out of the ground.

The operations also pump out nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, traces of which have been detected by scientists in soils and snowpack dozens of miles away.

The mines guzzle vast quantities of water, with nearly 58 billion gallons drawn from the region’s rivers, lakes and aquifers in 2019, according to government figures. Much of that ends up as toxic liquid waste laced with hydrocarbons, naphthenic acids and carcinogenic heavy metals. Oil companies have been collecting the “tailings” in waste ponds, which have grown exponentially in size and now cover more than 100 square miles. Regulatory filings show that the ponds are expected to continue to expand well into the 2030s. While companies are required by law to eventually reclaim them, only a fraction have been reclaimed so far.

Next to one pond, a coal-black mountain of debris towers over the water. High-voltage lines buzz overhead. Air cannons ring the pond and blast several times every minute, creating a constant explosive din. Industrial iron scarecrows are dressed with safety vests and helmets. The noise and the display are meant to scare off the millions of migratory birds that arrive in northern Alberta every year.

Scarecrows dressed like workers and devices that produce loud explosions that sound like gunshots are spread out around a Syncrude tailings pond with toxic water that could kill birds that land on it north of Fort McMurray (Michael Kodas)

Sometimes even those defenses fail, however, or the birds ignore them and land anyway — tens of thousands every year, according to a 2016 report to provincial regulators, obtained this year by The Narwhal, a nonprofit Canadian news organization.

Ottilie Coldbeck, a spokeswoman for the Alberta Energy Regulator, which oversees the industry, said the research in the report “was not considered complete.”
The history

White explorers set their sights on the tar sands as soon as they arrived. In 1789, Sir Alexander Mackenzie reported seeing veins of “bituminous quality” exposed along the Athabasca River. Within a century, prospectors and geologists had identified “almost inexhaustible supplies” of petroleum in the area. The only obstacle seemed to be the people living above it.

In 1891, the superintendent general of Indian affairs recommended drafting a treaty “with a view to the extinguishment of the Indians’ title” to open access to petroleum and other minerals. Within eight years, First Nations leaders had signed Treaty 8, in which they surrendered title of 325,000 square miles of land to the British crown while retaining the right to hunt, fish and trap freely throughout the area.

The tar sands remained largely beyond reach for decades, however, until Americans, driven by nationalistic ambitions, invested vast sums of capital.

When J. Howard Pew, of Sun Oil Co., opened the first commercial mine in 1967, the people of Fort McKay were not happy, said Jim Boucher, who led the First Nation as chief for three decades, until 2019. Sun Oil, now Suncor, took over an important summer hunting ground called Tar Island, he said. “There was no discussion, no consultation,” Boucher said.

The fur trade had provided the nation’s members with one of their few sources of income. But it collapsed just as the oil industry was taking hold, and they had few alternatives but to turn to the oil companies’ rapidly expanding mines.

“We had no choice,” Boucher said.

After he became chief in 1986, Boucher formed the Fort McKay Group of Companies to work with the oil industry, and over the following decades he oversaw partnerships with energy companies that would eventually net hundreds of millions of dollars for the community.

The income has allowed Fort McKay to build subsidized housing and to pay for education and elder care, achievements that Boucher rattles off proudly. Enrolled members receive quarterly dividends.

Jim Boucher was the chief of the Fort McKay First Nation from 1986 untill 1994 and again from 1996 until 2019. (Michael Kodas)

Some First Nations have fought the development with lawsuits. The Beaver Lake Cree Nation, to the south, sued the federal and provincial governments in 2008, saying its treaty rights had been violated by the cumulative effects of development. Even though it got a ruling five years later allowing the case to proceed, the case is still awaiting trial, with a court date scheduled for 2024.

Each of the area’s First Nations has signed “impact benefit agreements” with the oil companies that can include limits on certain practices, like water withdrawals, quotas for hiring Indigenous people and direct payments to the nations. But even as the impact agreements have secured benefits, they have deepened reliance on an industry that is consuming the land that was once the base of the Indigenous economy and culture.

​​L’Hommecourt, who is Boucher’s cousin, said she holds no resentment toward him for tying their people’s fate to the industry.

“He did what he had to do, and as a chief I commend him,” L’Hommecourt said. “They call us the richest little First Nation in Canada.”

Boucher lost his grandfather’s cabin, where he learned to hunt and trap as a boy, to a mine dug by Syncrude, a consortium of oil companies. A cabin Boucher later built for his father, to the north, now sits on a postage stamp of land, he said, surrounded by newer mines.

“It’s empty. That’s how the cabin is to me,” Boucher said. “So I don’t go there anymore. No joy.”

The effects

While the mines cover an expansive area, their impact on the environment reaches much farther.

The town of Fort Chipewyan sits where the Peace and Athabasca rivers empty into Lake Athabasca, about 90 miles north of the closest mine, and the land here offers a glimpse of what existed before. The mostly Indigenous residents can still hunt and trap in unbroken stretches of boreal forest.

But while the nights are quiet and the air smells clean, the industry’s presence is strong. Kids zoom around town on ATVs, while the supermarket displays boxes of 87-inch flat-screen TVs — ”toys,” as some residents call them, that only those who work in the industry can afford.

And despite the lake’s distance from the development, the flesh of some animals that drink from it is laced with some of the same heavy metals that collect in the waste pits.

In 2010, a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found elevated levels of mercury, lead, nickel and other heavy metals in the river downstream of oil sands development, as well as in Lake Athabasca. Three years later, another study in the same journal examined lake sediments surrounding Fort McMurray and found that a group of chemicals that include cancer-causing compounds started rising in the 1960s and ʼ70s, when oil sands development began.

The Athabasca Chipewyan and Mikisew Cree First Nations commissioned Stéphane McLachlan, an environmental scientist at the University of Manitoba, to test the tissues of animals, and in 2014 he released a report finding elevated levels of toxic pollutants — including arsenic, mercury and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons — in the flesh of moose, ducks and muskrats in the region.

Provincial officials acknowledge that the mines’ waste ponds leak into groundwater. To “limit the risk” that the seepage will spread farther, the Alberta Energy Regulator requires companies to install drains, wells, sumps and underground walls to capture and contain the contamination, said Coldbeck, the agency spokeswoman.

An oil sands mine in Alberta, Canada adjascent to boreal forest outside of Fort McMurray. (Michael Kodas)

Federal and provincial officials have disputed research that has linked groundwater contamination to the waste pits, citing other studies that indicate that the compounds may be naturally occurring in groundwater because they are contained in bitumen.

But last year, the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, an environmental body created alongside the North American Free Trade Agreement, assessed all the published studies of water contamination and concluded that there was “scientifically valid evidence” that the waste pits were leaching contaminants into groundwater. The analysis noted that some research has concluded that the contamination reached the Athabasca River but that scientists were still debating the findings.

Asked about the report, Coldbeck said her agency “does not have any evidence” that contaminated groundwater has reached the Athabasca River. In response to a question about health concerns, she said the agency “is committed to ensuring that Alberta’s oil sands are developed in a safe and responsible manner” and referred questions to Alberta Health, the province’s public health agency.

A spokesperson for Alberta Health did not reply to requests for comment.

A spokeswoman for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers declined to comment, pointing instead to reports the group has issued about engagement with Indigenous communities and about greenhouse gas emissions.

Meanwhile, published surveys of cancer cases in Fort Chipewyan carried out in 2009 and 2014 came up with mixed results. Both showed higher-than-normal rates of certain cancers, including biliary tract cancers. One study determined that overall cancer rates were elevated. The other did not.

Alice Rigney, an elder with the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, blames the oil development for her nephew’s death from bile duct cancer, even as she acknowledges that there is nothing to prove the connection.

“They took it all away,” she said of the oil companies, speaking not just about her nephew but also about the broader environmental impacts. “What else is there to take?”
The future

The global oil industry is increasingly under assault, and Canada’s tar sands, because of the developments’ high greenhouse gas emissions, are a prime target of climate activists. Because new tar sands projects require billions of dollars of investment up front, many financial analysts say the era of opening new mines is over.

But even if production from the mines holds steady or declines gradually, their massive footprints are likely to expand for decades, because companies must continue to clear land to keep up production.

And whenever the mines do decline, the industry will face the challenge of what to do with the waste it has produced. The provincial government has secured $730 million from companies as collateral for a cleanup, but that will not even begin to cover the costs. While regulators’ official estimate of the liability for Alberta’s mining industry is $27 billion, an internal report obtained in 2018 by Canadian journalists estimated cleanup costs of more than $100 billion.

Jean L'Hommecourt visits a river near the Fort McKay First Nation's village about an hour's drive north of Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada. (Michael Kodas)

L’Hommecourt said she is torn about whether she will remain here. “My heart is in the boreal forest,” she said. But her kids want to move away, and if they do, she might, too. The mines are coming closer to the cabin, and more roads are being blocked off.

Regulatory filings show that Imperial Oil plans eventually to reroute the creek that runs past her cabin to make way for its Kearl mine. If it does so, the land where the cabin sits would be buried by land cleared from elsewhere within the mine.

A spokeswoman for Imperial, Exxon’s Canadian affiliate, declined to comment specifically on the filings but said the company “has collaborative and unique relationship agreements with these local communities that provide mutual benefits.”

The cabin itself has been a symbol of L’Hommecourt’s resistance. It sits on an old trappers’ trail that Imperial’s workers began using about 10 years ago as an unpaved access road for exploration, marking it off with a “No Trespassing” sign. L’Hommecourt built her cabin in the middle of that road.

“I just said, ‘I don’t care,’” L’Hommecourt said. “I’m going to put my house right here, and this is where it’s going to be.” When company workers come by, she said, “I just tell them, ‘Turn around and go back, and if you have a problem with it, get your VP or whoever it is that you report to and then tell them to come and see me.’”

So far, no one has shown up.