It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
The carbon capture project at SaskPower's Boundary Dam isn't meeting targets of 90 per cent carbon capture, according to University of Regina professor Emily Eaton. (Michael Bell/Canadian Press)
A University of Regina professor is challenging Premier Scott Moe's claims that the province has the most sustainable energy sector in the world.
Emily Eaton, a professor of geography and environmental studies at the University of Regina, said that contrary to Moe's recent claims, Saskatchewan's fossil-fuel industry is a major polluter.
"Saskatchewan has the highest greenhouse gas emissions per capita in Canada and some of the highest across the whole world," Eaton told CBC's The Morning Edition.
"And it is largely a result of our oil and gas industry. Thirty per cent of Saskatchewan's greenhouse gases come from that single industry."
Speaking to a crowd of supporters at a Sask Party convention this past weekend, Moe said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau should be promoting Saskatchewan's sustainable energy to countries attending the COP26 climate change conference in Glasgow, Scotland.
"If everyone else in the world produced their energy the same way we did here in Saskatchewan ...global emissions in oil production would drop by 25 per cent overnight."
A spokesperson for Moe said he was referring to a 2018 University of Calgary study that said adopting Canada's standards and regulations would cut emissions globally by one quarter.
According to the Government of Canada, Saskatchewan produced 74.8 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2019, up 10 per cent from 2005.
Carbon capture just prolongs reliance on oil: scientist
Eaton said that Saskatchewan is doing a poor job of transitioning away from fossil fuels.
She said the province has poured money into carbon capture projects that are providing less than optimum results.
In 2014, Unit 3 of SaskPower's Boundary Dam Power Station was retrofitted to capture carbon emissions, the first power station in the world to successfully capture and store carbon emissions.
SaskPower relies on coal, a large producer of greenhouse gas emissions, for 30 per cent of its power supply.
At the time, the carbon capture project aimed to capture about 90 per cent of emissions from the coal-fired plant.
Eaton said studies are showing that the carbon capture rate at Boundary Dam is closer to 45 per cent.
"Carbon capture is a dangerous distraction that consumes a lot of public resources and prevents us … from not making the pollution in the first place," she said.
Eaton said that capturing emissions from fossil fuel production isn't enough to meet climate change targets.
"About 80 to 95 per cent of the emissions come from combusting that fossil fuel, whether that's in combustion engines or in gas fired coal plants. And so even if we could reduce the emissions from our oil and gas industry down to something close to net zero, we can't be producing fossil fuels in a zero carbon future."
Matthew Glover, a spokesperson for the province, said that Saskatchewan's Whitecap Enhanced Oil Recovery facility sequesters about half of Canada's carbon emissions annually and has 82 per cent fewer emissions compared with standard oil extraction.
"As the demand for oil is expected to grow over the next decade, our government will continue to poise Saskatchewan to be a leading supplier of energy that the world needs, while standing by our record on environmental stewardship and human rights compared to other jurisdictions."
Eaton said focusing on carbon capture just prolongs Saskatchewan's reliance on fossil fuels when time and resources should be spent transitioning away from that industry.
"We're not talking about turning the tap off overnight. We're talking about today's oil production is the peak production."
She also said that the emissions captured at the Boundary Dam are sent by pipeline to the Weyburn oil fields, where they are being used for enhanced oil recovery.
"So we're actually producing more fossil fuels than we would otherwise be able to do through sequestration and utilization of that carbon."
Mayor of Estevan, Sask., frustrated with lack of carbon capture decisions By The Canadian Press in News, Politics | June 5th 2019
The mayor of a southeastern Saskatchewan city says he's frustrated by a lack of government announcements on the future of a technology that would allow coal-fired power plants to stay open. Roy Ludwig of Estevan says he wants carbon capture and storage capacity expanded to the Shand Power Station and to an additional unit at Boundary Dam where it already exists. The technology takes emissions produced by burning fossil fuels and stores them primarily underground. The one unit at the Boundary Dam that uses carbon capture is being allowed to stay active beyond 2030 — the year Saskatchewan has agreed with Ottawa to shut down most of its coal-fired plants. Last year, SaskPower cited the low cost of natural gas when it decided against expanding the technology to at least two other Boundary Dam units and to study the feasibility of doing so at Shand instead. Ludwig said people living in his city are nervous and he wants to see the province expand the technology to keep coal miners working. "We support this provincial government and we expect them to support us," Ludwig said in an interview with The Canadian Press. "We will continue to press the government, but it is frustrating that we haven't had those announcements, 'cause we absolutely need those announcements." Premier Scott Moe has said carbon capture and storage is part of a conversation taking place about cleaning up Saskatchewan's emissions profile. "You don't just commit to a technology," he said on the last day of the spring legislative sitting in May. Ludwig has a background in the coal industry and expects the decision to shut down both units at Boundary Dam by 2024 instead of retrofitting them with carbon capture technology to put 100 coal mining jobs at risk. "That's going to be huge," he said. "These are all people that have well-paying jobs and have families in our community." Farming, oil and gas, and coal mining are staple industries in the city, Ludwig said. Estevan has formed a committee with local leaders to look at what businesses can be expanded or attracted to the area in the face of a move away from coal. Officials are also in talks with different cannabis producers to develop greenhouses for growing product and are looking to expand into warehousing, Ludwig said. About 200 kilometres to the west, the town of Coronach is also looking to hire a consultant to help broaden its economy. "Honestly we don't even know where to begin," said mayor Trevor Schnell. It looks like hundreds of jobs could be lost in about 10 years, he said, and Coronach needs to be prepared. A request for proposals posted to the province's buying and selling website says the Poplar River Power Plant and the Westmoreland Coal Mine have been the main employers in the southern region for decades. "The socio-economic impact of their proposed shutdown will affect over 300 workers directly, as well as a yet undetermined impact on trading area businesses/communities within a 100-km radius," the online document reads. "The quality of life and emotional state of local and regional residents are already being impacted." SEE MY POST(S) ON CARBON CAPTURE NOT GREEN NOR CLEAN
Wednesday, September 02, 2020
Rubber debris litters miles of Puyallup River after artificial turf was used in dam project without permit
by Lynda V. Mapes, The Seattle Times
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain
In black waves, drifts and bands, crumbs of rubber are polluting miles of the Puyallup River after a spill at a dam project last month.
Rubber debris already is likely more than 40 miles downriver in Puget Sound. The pollution is the result of unpermitted use of thousands of yards of artificial turf by the dam's owners while reconstructing parts of the dam.
The Puyallup Tribe was first alerted to the spill by a social media post put up July 31 by Derek Van Giesen, a former employee of Electron Hydro, an owner of the Electron Hydropower Project. He walked off the job over the installation of the turf liner and a large fish kill at the dam that took place the same day of the spill, which occurred overnight on July 29.
Van Giesen said the turf came from a pile stored on the property of a neighboring rock quarry. The pile is at least one story high and as long as a football field.
The company did not inform regulators of the pollution discharge until Aug. 4, according to a consultant's report on the spill prepared for Electron Hydro. A stop-work order was imposed on the company's construction project Aug. 7 by Pierce County and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
From the stop order: "The use of astro-turf in a river system where it can break down and discharge potential toxins into the water is not considered a suitable material."
The question now is how to clean up the mess, just weeks before adult chinook salmon listed for protection under the federal Endangered Species Act are expected to arrive on their homeward journey.
According to the consultant's report, the company, as part of its work on a bypass channel at the dam, placed 2,409 square yards of FieldTurf on the channel between July 20 and 27. The turf was intended to function as an underlayment for a plastic liner put on top of it. The company then diverted the river into the bypass channel to create a dry area to continue ongoing work at its dam.
The night of July 29, the diverted river—well known for its rock-chucking high flows—ripped pieces of the liner and turf loose, sending hunks of artificial turf and a torrent of loose black crumb rubber downriver.
The consultant, Shane Cherry of Shane Cherry Consulting of Fort Myers, Florida, estimated that at least 617 square yards of the artificial turf was ruptured by the river; about 1,792 square yards remain in place under the liner.
At least 4 to 6 cubic yards of crumb rubber—each piece about the size of a fat coffee ground—was released to the river, in the pristine upper reaches of the Puyallup, about 6 miles from the boundary with Mount Rainier National Park.
The consultant estimated the rate of travel in the water at 2 mph. The rubber probably reached Orting within nine hours, and Tacoma and Commencement Bay within 20 hours. The river would have deposited crumb rubber all along the way, a distance of some 40 miles, in channel margins, in deep pools, in coves and river bends, and continued redistributing it ever since.
On a visit to the river Thursday with The Seattle Times, Sylvia Miller, vice chairwoman of the Puyallup Tribal council, said she was sick at heart because of the spill.
"I feel anger, so much anger," Miller said. "It hurts to see how much damage they are doing to our lands and waters, everyone's lands and waters."
Everywhere he looked for it along the river, Russ Ladley, resource protection manager for the Puyallup Tribe, saw crumbs of black rubber. Immediately downstream of the dam, it lay in streaks of black on the beach. Fourteen miles down river, there it was again, in black nubby necklaces around rocks, in bands along the shore, in heaps on the river's sandy bank.
Lisa Anderson, tribal attorney, shook her head and grimaced at the mess. The company should not be permitted to resume its work on its project and must instead clean up the river, Anderson said.
Chris Spens, director of regulatory and environmental affairs for Tollhouse Energy Company in Bellingham, which owns the dam with Electron Hydro LLC, said in an email to The Seattle Times that the company is cooperating with the Corps, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW), Pierce County and the state Department of Ecology to clean up the spill and do restoration and mitigation work.
The dam, formerly owned by Puget Sound Energy, is 116 years old and produces electricity for about 20,000 homes. Reconstruction at the dam is intended, along with screens and other equipment, to prevent fish and sediment from entering the flume, used to deliver water for the project.
"Electron is committed to providing clean energy and restoring Puyallup River fisheries," Spens wrote, and the company will deal with the spill before continuing work on the dam, he added.
Van Giesen in his social media post showed the placement of the artificial turf in a video in which he kicked drifts of black crumb rubber with his shoe to show the volume of rubber debris. "This is not sand," he said as he took video.
"Millions of tiny rubber beads ... all washed down the river and are polluting my lifelong fishing holes. What is on video here is just a small portion of the spill ...
"All the rubber is actually inside the astro turf ... and spills out when moved."
Van Giesen said in an interview he put up the post because as a lifelong fisherman who grew up along the Puyallup, he was disgusted by what he saw. "I just quit. I knew it was not the right place for me. I don't know how you clean it up, the damage is done and will probably continue past when I am on my deathbed," he said.
He said he knew the spill would happen. "Even I know the water table is right underneath the liner, and I'm just an average Joe," he said.
Before the river tore hunks of the turf away, walking on the liner "was like walking on a waterbed," VanGiesen said.
This was not the first trouble at Electron Dam.
Fish and Wildlife reported a fish kill on the river the same day, as Electron Hydro dewatered a stretch of the river during routine maintenance at its dam, causing what the department described as "a large fish kill, resulting in the loss of ESA-listed species, including Chinook, and bull trout, along with coho, rainbow trout, cutthroat trout, and sculpin."
Electron Hydro crews had neither the proper equipment nor used proper techniques during the dewatering procedure, resulting in fish being killed by high temperatures and lack of oxygen, according to the on-scene report written by Tara Livingood-Schott, a WDFW biologist. She was on hand to assist with fish sampling and counting.
The work became dangerous for the crew, too, as two of them sank in mud up to their waists, she reported.
Canada geese and eagles feasted on stranded fish as all attention was shifted from rescuing the fish in the dewatering channel to rescuing the workers. "The situation was becoming increasingly urgent to free the two, as they were sinking slowly by the minute," she wrote.
"It took around 45 minutes to free the individuals from the mud and during this time no fish recoveries took place as flows continued to drop, stranding more and more fish."
The total number of fish lost was unknown, she reported, "but my best educated guess would be in the thousands," including unauthorized lethal take of ESA-listed fall chinook, winter steelhead and bull trout in all life stages.
For Bill Sterud, chairman of the Puyallup Tribe, the rubber spill is personally painful.
"To me, my church is the river. It is the sound. It is the mountain. It is the forest. And when I see this degrading take place it affects me internally. It hurts."
To him this latest event is nothing new in the history of a dam the tribe never wanted.
"It will always be a fish killer. It should ultimately be taken down. We are going to do our best at the tribe to make that happen. That is my goal and my hope of what we should strive for. It's a new era," he said. "Fish are important. Clean water is important ... we have one mother Earth and it is being degraded as we speak."
The Puyallup originates in glaciers along the slopes of Mount Rainier in the Cascades. It flows about 65 miles to Commencement Bay and forms the third largest tributary to Puget Sound.
The river flows through the reservation of the Puyallup Tribe, which has fished and lived along its waters since time immemorial. The river is home to eight ocean-migrating fish populations, including chinook, coho, chum, pink and sockeye salmon, steelhead trout, bull trout and sea-run cutthroat trout.
Historically the river supported as many as 42,000 chinook. The run is greatly diminished today to a little more than 1,000 fish and was listed for protection in 1999 under the ESA.
Chinook from the river are critical to endangered southern resident killer whales, which primarily feed on chinook.
The Electron dam, about 42 miles southeast of Seattle in Pierce County, is a 10-foot-high wooden dam, about 200 feet long, that diverts water into a 10-mile-long wooden flume conveying water to the dam's powerhouse.
Fish regularly are entrapped and killed at the dam, long a problem known to regulators.
Replacement of the old dam with new equipment is intended to address the problems with a dam, identified in a 2005 watershed analysis as "the most serious single threat to Chinook salmon in the watershed area," according a letter written by federal regulators back when the dam was owned by Puget Sound Energy.
PSE sold the dam to Electron in 2014, but still sells electricity from the project.
By June Sekera | Opinion | March 20th 2023 According to the IPCC’s Working Group III report, carbon capture is one of the least-effective, most-expensive climate change mitigation options on Earth.
Photo by Shutterstock
This week, oil and gas lobbyists are gearing up for a busy few days. Today, the IPCC — the UN experts on climate science — is publishing a new report on the impact of global warming and our best options to slow it down.
Expect lots of spin about carbon capture and storage (CCS): the machinery and chemicals that aim to capture CO2 as it emerges from the smokestacks of factories and power plants burning fossil fuels. Theoretically, the idea is to reduce the amount of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere and store it underground or use it elsewhere. Don’t be misled when fossil lobbyists once again push the message that UN scientists say it’s a technology we must rely on to limit climate change.
I’ve spent several years studying carbon capture and my research is cited in the IPCC Working Group III report. I can tell you that when you look at the details of the IPCC’s findings, the scientists say something quite different.
According to the IPCC’s Working Group III report, carbon capture is one of the least-effective, most-expensive climate change mitigation options on Earth. Scientists rank it close to the bottom of a long list of options, easily outstripped by more affordable solutions like wind and solar energy. And it scores fire-alarm red for cost.
Figure SPM.7: Overview of mitigation options and their estimated ranges of costs and potentials in 2030. Source: IPCC
The IPCC report notes that limiting warming to 2 C will require “rapid and deep and, in most cases, immediate” greenhouse gas emission reductions in all sectors, mainly through cuts to fossil fuel use.
The same IPCC report shows that rather than carbon “capture” or mechanical carbon “removal”, the more effective and faster way to remove billions of tons of CO2 from the atmosphere is to restore and expand the carbon sequestration capabilities of plants and soil. My latest research supports this finding. So long as biological sequestration is not connected to carbon “offset” schemes, it can be a powerful tool to address climate change.
Carbon capture, on the other hand, is a placebo. It gives oil and gas companies a story to tell about acting on emissions while they keep extracting, and we keep burning, fossil fuels.
Take the case of the Boundary Dam in Saskatchewan. It captures some of the CO2 pumped out from the coal-fired power station — then pipes it directly to an oilfield where it’s injected underground to squeeze even more oil from the Earth.
Factor in emissions from burning that oil, it’s clear carbon capture doesn’t fix the fossil fuel emissions problem. Research on carbon capture processes, like that of the Boundary Dam, found they can emit three to four times as much CO2 as they inject underground.
Carbon capture is a placebo. It gives oil and gas companies a story to tell about acting on emissions while they keep extracting, and we keep burning, fossil fuels, writes June Sekera. #cdnpoli #CCUS #cdnpoli #ClimateAction #IPCC #IPCCSynthesisReport
Tellingly, the fossil fuel industry isn’t prepared to pay the price of this technology. In Canada and the U.S., CCS is enabled by massive public subsidies. In Canada, ratepayers have paid higher electricity prices triggered by the Boundary Dam carbon capture scheme. Under a proposal announced last year, Canadian taxpayers would be on the hook for a new carbon capture tax credit, despite pleas from over 400 scientists against it.
In the U.S., ExxonMobil wants to build a giant carbon capture “hub” in Texas, but says it needs government subsidies to make it feasible. Oil and gas firms are some of the world’s richest companies. If they really believe in this technology, why won’t they pay for it?
Carbon capture schemes don’t just fail as climate solutions — they harm people. Research shows that carbon capture at scale would require a network of tens of thousands of kilometres of pipelines across the country. Ask the town of Satartia, Miss., what happens when a CO2 pipeline ruptures. In 2020, people collapsed in their homes and trucks, dazed and nauseous when the fast-spreading, odourless, colourless gas displaced oxygen. Car engines died, so people couldn’t escape. Nearly 50 people were taken to hospital. As always, disasters like these hit rural communities, poor people, and people of colour first and worst.
With CCS, we are building “a taxpayer-financed sewer system for the fossil fuel industry,” says Kert Davies, director of the Climate Investigations Center. It’s time to end the era of public subsidy for CCS. It’s not taxpayers who should pay for these costly experiments, it’s the businesses profiting from pollution. You can’t reap record profits from high oil prices and then claim you don’t have the funds to deal with your emissions. Legislation should require that carbon capture at emissions sources is only ever done at the producer’s expense.
You may hear a lot of news about carbon capture this month. When you do, realize that — even with all this spin and all those subsidies — the great expectations for carbon capture have not been met.
Every dollar we spend on this dangerous and counter-productive technology is a dollar we can’t spend on real solutions to climate change — wind, solar, and energy efficiency. As climate change wrecks more of our homes, that’s a path we can’t afford to take.
June Sekera is a public policy practitioner and researcher whose work and publications are focused on the public economy and public goods production. She is a visiting scholar at the New School for Social Research, Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies, where she is the director of the Public Economy Project. Sekera's scientific research on carbon capture and storage (CCS) has been cited by the IPCC.
Estevan’s mayor Roy Ludwig wrote a letter to Musk, inviting him to the city to tour their Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) facility at Boundary Dam Power Station.
Ludwig’s proposal was in response to one of Musk’s tweets , which detailed the business mogul’s plans to donate $100 million dollars towards a prize for best carbon capture technology.
“When we first saw the tweet and heard about the XPRIZE contest, we knew we had an opportunity to showcase this world class technology and promote the environmental and economic benefits that this facility has brought to our city,” said Ludwig, in a news release issued this week.
Estevan, some 20 kilometres north of the Canada-U.S border, is known as the energy capital of Saskatchewan. Their economy is defined by power generation, as well as by coal mining, agriculture, manufacturing, and oil and gas drilling.
Their $1.5 billion CCS facility, which is attached to SaskPower’s Boundary Dam 3 (BD3), opened in 2014 has garnered a reputation for being the first of its kind. It is capable of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by up to one million tonnes of carbon dioxide annually, which is the equivalent of removing 250,000 cars from the road. It is known as the world’s first fully-integrated and full-chain carbon CCS facility on a coal-fired power plant, although it has also been plagued by challenges meeting its yearly carbon capture targets.
THE REALITY IS THAT CCS IS NOT GREEN NOR CLEAN IT IS GOING TO BE USED TO FRACK OLD DRY WELLS SUCH AS IN THE BAKAN SHIELD IN SASKATCHEWAN
It started as a pilot project, but gradually expanded to become a full-time endeavour. The CCS facility set the bar for other organizations, including Estevan’s Shand Power Station, which functions as a test facility where international clients can analyze their carbon capture and storage systems commercially.
“Industry and government officials from across the globe have toured and researched this facility and it has been the blueprint for other CCS projects in the world,” said Ludwig.
In the statement, Ludwig stressed the importance of community support. He encouraged residents to further the conversation by retweeting Musk’s message and tagging him in posts online. He also stressed the importance of sharing the letter he wrote to Musk, which can be found on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram , and LinkedIn .
Carbon capture key to net-zero electricity, but federal timelines too tight: report
Amanda Stephenson, The Canadian Press
Carbon capture and storage is key to greening Canada's electricity grid, but meeting the proposed time frame laid out by the federal government will be extremely difficult based on the current state of the technology, according to a new report.
The report also warns that if federal clean electricity regulations are too stringent, it could scare companies away from investing in emissions-reducing carbon capture altogether.
Carbon capture and storage is a term that describes the use of technology to capture harmful greenhouse gas emissions from industrial processes and store them safely underground, preventing them from entering the atmosphere.
Experts say the large-scale deployment of carbon capture and storage in hard-to-abate sectors like oil and gas production and cement manufacturing will be required if Canada is to have a shot at meeting its climate targets.
Carbon capture and storage units will also need to be installed on natural gas and coal-fired power plants in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia — provinces that don't have significant hydroelectric capacity and as such are still heavily reliant on fossil fuels — if the country is to meet Ottawa's goal of obtaining a net-zero electricity grid by 2035.
But Thursday's report from the Regina-based International CCUS Knowledge Centre urges the federal government to rethink the emissions intensity limits for carbon capture-abated power plants laid out in its draft clean electricity regulations.
The draft regulations currently state that after 2035, fossil fuel-driven power plants will have to meet an emissions performance standard of no more than 30 tonnes of carbon dioxide per gigawatt of electricity produced per year.
That means to be compliant, natural gas-fired power plants would need to achieve a nearly 95 per cent CO2 capture rate, said Beth Valiaho, the CCUS Knowledge Centre’s vice-president of policy, regulatory and stakeholder relations.
She added no carbon capture facility in the world is currently achieving that level of performance. SaskPower's Boundary Dam, for example — the only large-scale carbon capture facility currently installed on a power plant in Canada — has a capture rate of 65 to 70 per cent.
That facility was designed to have a 90 per cent emissions capture rate, but has been plagued by technical issues and equipment failures.
"It doesn't mean it can't be done," Valiaho said, adding many carbon capture technology vendors believe a 95 per cent capture rate is technically achievable.
"I think there is a future state where this works at that kind of high level, but, you know, there's not one operating continuously in the world right now with that type of performance."
Valiaho said many of the problems that have been encountered at Boundary Dam can be avoided at future carbon capture facilities by employing some of the lessons learned at that site.
But she said if the federal requirements are too strict, and power generators have doubt about whether the standards are achievable, they may choose not to invest in carbon capture at all.
Overly stringent regulations could also put operators who installed carbon capture technology in good faith in the position of being non-compliant with the law. Valiaho said under the current draft regulations, Boundary Dam would have to shut down, even though the facility has captured more than four million tonnes of harmful CO2 since operations began in 2014.
"We want to see CCUS go forward. We don't want it to fail because of unachievable standards," she said.
Scott MacDougall, an electricity program director at the Pembina Institute, said carbon capture and storage is an extremely important technology when it comes to reducing emissions from the electricity sector, especially in Saskatchewan and Alberta.
He said he's hopeful the federal government will hear the feedback from industry and build more leniency into the regulations.
"The (clean electricity regulations) should incent the use of CCUS technology and not penalize it," MacDougall said.
"Hopefully they'll take some advice on board about this and make some adjustments down the road."
Saturday, October 16, 2021
Ethiopia's Mega-Dam is About to Reshape the Water Politics of the Nile
A US Geological Survey image shows green farmland marking a distinct boundary between the Nile floodplain and the surrounding harsh desert (USGS)
Amid an increasingly bitter war and an impending famine in Ethiopia’s northern region of Tigray, there is still, perhaps, one issue that unites Ethiopians, no matter their political views: that their country has the absolute right to develop and use its hydroelectric potential on the Blue Nile (or as the river is named in Ethiopia, the Abay). And that potential is on the cusp of being realized.
For the past decade, the second most populous country in Africa has been building the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), about 25 miles from the border with Sudan. The dam is a strand of continuity between Ethiopia’s ousted political regime, which started the construction and now finds itself fighting the federal government over Tigray, and the post-2018 government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who recently won a commanding majority and his first five year term in office. Once complete, the GERD will be capable of producing as many as 6,450 megawatts (MW) of electricity, ranking it as one of the world’s largest dams and by far Africa’s largest dam by electricity production. To put the GERD in perspective, only five dams outside of China have greater installed production capacity.
Sudan and Uganda have both built large Nile dams in recent years, and there are numerous older dams on the Sudanese portion of the Blue Nile. Until now, the Nile’s largest dam was at Aswan, Egypt (installed capacity of 2,100 MW). Completed in 1970, it transformed Egypt by ending the Nile’s seasonal floods, creating hundreds of thousands of acres of newly arable, irrigated land, and bringing electricity to millions of Egyptians. It was also built without consulting upstream countries, drawing on antiquated colonial treaties to which Ethiopia, which escaped colonialization, was never a party.
The GERD, in a sense, offers Ethiopia an Aswan moment. It promises to provide power to millions of poor Ethiopians; only 47 per cent of the country’s 115 million people are currently connected to the grid. The dam could make Ethiopia a clean energy hub, providing cheap power to growing economies across the region. But much has changed since 1970. Then, Egypt had just 27 million people, Ethiopia 22 million, and Sudan 8 million. In 2020, Egypt’s population had reached 102 million, Ethiopia’s 115 million, and Sudan’s 44 million. But Ethiopia’s future population growth promises to be the most explosive, doubling by 2050 to more than 200 million; Egypt is projected to grow to 160 million, and Sudan to 80 million. Even if population growth slows significantly, the amount of available water will clearly not increase on a per capita basis.
In effect, Egypt’s concerns about the GERD are a preview of the downstream country’s present and future econo-hydrological challenges. More than 80 per cent of the Nile water that reaches Egypt comes from the Blue Nile and the Ethiopian highlands. In its objections to the GERD, Egypt has cast the issue as a national existential crisis. In the GERD dispute, questions of emotion and identity have been ignored in favour of material and technical arguments about water security. Competing conceptions of state identity and entitlement make technical compromises over the dam’s operation much harder to reach. Still, more than 80 per cent of Egypt’s water is consumed by agriculture, an increasing amount of which is destined for export rather than local needs. What the GERD risks for Egypt is upsetting the national expectation that the country will be ever fertile, defying the desert.
In September, Ethiopia announced that the GERD would begin to produce power in the coming months. Dam construction continues despite an impasse in the trilateral negotiations between Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan. For now, heavy rainfall and high seasonal flows on the river have averted a crisis, allowing the dam to fill without significant downstream consequences. But for several years, the characterisation of the dispute has changed little; wrangling over the dam has proceeded as if the day of completion would never come. The GERD is almost a fait accompli; now, more water flows into the reservoir each day than can physically exit the dam wall. Negotiations, therefore, are no longer about a hypothetical change on the river; change is already here.
Due to its scale, the case of the GERD could be an important example of how to approach, or not approach, future transboundary water management in an increasingly water scarce world. More than 260 watersheds cross the borders of two or more countries, and approximately 40 per cent of the world's population lives in transboundary river and lake basins. While not all transboundary watersheds are shared by countries at loggerheads, imperatives for regional cooperation may still not trump national interests. In Ethiopia, despite a war, a worsening economy, and growing international pressure, the GERD is an indisputable priority and a point of national pride; for some, it is even a cause to support the Abiy government. Given its present difficulties, the rhetoric of an Ethiopian renaissance may be overstated, but despite the challenges, Ethiopia’s development ambitions remain very real.
Aly Verjee is a political analyst. A fellow of the Rift Valley Institute, he was a visiting expert and then senior advisor to the Africa Center at the US Institute of Peace in Washington, DC. Previously, he was deputy and then acting chief of staff to the former president of Botswana, Festus Mogae, the chair of the Joint Monitoring and Evaluation Commission overseeing the 2015 peace agreement in South Sudan.
This article appears courtesy of The Lowy Interpreter and may be found in its original form here.
Friday, January 21, 2022
Hundreds of academics ask Freeland to scrap carbon capture tax credit
"This is one of the largest groups I've seen sign a letter of this type in Canada,"
OTTAWA — More than 400 Canadian climate scientists and other academics are pleading with Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland to scrap her plan to create a tax credit for companies that build carbon capture and storage facilities.
Freeland floated the idea of the tax credit in last year's federal budget and consultations to design it ended just before Christmas.
A letter sent to Freeland Wednesday asks her to ditch the idea altogether, calling it a massive subsidy to the oil and gas industry.
"As well as undermining government efforts to reach net zero by 2050, the introduction of this tax credit would contradict the promise made by your government to Canadians during the election period to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies by 2023 as well as our international commitments under the Paris agreement," the letter reads.
"And once new subsidies are put in place, they are very hard to repeal."
Carbon capture, storage and utilization systems, known as CCUS, trap and isolate carbon dioxide emitted mostly from large-scale industrial operations and store it deep underground. Most projects currently use the added pressure created by the stored CO2 to push more oil out of the ground, known as enhanced oil recovery.
In Canada the biggest project is at the Boundary Dam coal-fired power plant in Saskatchewan, but there is also at least one project in the oilsands as well. Both include enhanced oil recovery.
Freeland has made clear enhanced oil recovery will not qualify for any tax credit but the academics want her to go further and limit its use only to industries that have no other options for reducing emissions, such as cement or steel. They want oil, gas, petrochemical and plastics producers to be excluded.
Adrienne Vaupshas, spokeswoman for Freeland, said in an email that the tax credit is about reducing emissions by at least 15 million tonnes a year.
That's about five per cent of the total emissions Canada needs to eliminate to hit its new targets for 2030 set last year.
"Consultations with the industry and other stakeholders with respect to the design of this CCUS measure have been positive and productive," Vaupshas said.
Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson told The Canadian Press last fall that there is a role for CCUS in Canada, but it's not a solution for everything, and would only be supported if it captures all emissions.
The Boundary Dam project in Saskatchewan, for example, captures maybe 70 per cent, which also isn't good enough for the dam to pass muster on federal regulations requiring an end to unabated coal power by 2030.
"I would say to you, at this stage in Canada, CCS technology has not reached the level of commercial maturity nor cost maturity, that is likely going to be a solution before 2030," Wilkinson said. Emily Eaton, an associate professor of geography and environmental studies at the University of Regina, said even if CCUS technology cuts emissions during fossil fuel production, that oil and gas is eventually going to be burned somewhere.
"So the federal government, I think, really has a choice to make," she said. "Either join countries around the world and plan for a sort of managed phaseout of oil and gas or it can prop up this industry with this unproven technology and sort of extend the life and also the emissions of the fossil fuel sector indefinitely."
The letter also argues that carbon capture and storage is still unproven on a large scale, and is very expensive relative to investments in renewable energies like solar and wind power.
Last summer Canada's biggest oil companies said getting the oilsands alone to net-zero emissions by 2050 would cost about $75 billion and about half the cuts will have to be made with CCUS. They also said the government would have to shoulder a lot of the cost. The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers said in August it wanted the CCUS tax credit to cover 75 per cent of the cost.
Matthew Paterson is a politics professor with a focus on climate, who until recently worked at the University of Ottawa. Now at the University of Manchester in England, Paterson said there is a political tension in Canada that exists for governments trying to maintain both climate action and the fossil fuel industry, which accounts for more than five per cent of the Canadian economy.
"They're a really good test case of how if you don't pick a side you are failing from a climate point of view," Paterson said. "At some moment those conflicts between fossil fuel interests and climate action are pretty sharp."
Freeland's office has not yet responded to the letter writers. University of Victoria geography and civil engineering professor Christina Hoicka, one of the lead authors of the letter, said she was pleasantly surprised by how many people signed it in just a few weeks. "This is one of the largest groups I've seen sign a letter of this type in Canada," she said.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 20, 2022.
Mia Rabson, The Canadian Press
Monday, September 05, 2022
New study questions carbon capture projects' ability to cut global CO2 emissions
A report found that many carbon capture projects either underperformed or failed.
SINGAPORE - A new study calls into question the ability of carbon capture projects to cut global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, and puts forth recommendations for upcoming projects if no alternative solutions to emission reduction can be found.
The report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis released last Thursday found that many carbon capture projects either underperformed or failed, and questioned whether the world could rely on such technology to meet its target of net-zero emissions.
The problem is that much of the CO2 captured is being used to extract more oil from oil fields, which contributes to more CO2 emissions, said the study.
It also found that CO2 that has been captured and stored may leak into the atmosphere. This means such storage facilities would require monitoring for centuries to ensure that trapped CO2 does not return to the atmosphere, said the study's author, Mr Bruce Robertson.
Hence, the report called on developers to take responsibility for the leakage of CO2 from their projects, and stressed that CO2 captured should not be used in oil extraction.
Carbon capture projects must also not be used by governments as a climate solution to justify the use of any type of fossil fuel, said the report.
Carbon capture and storage technology entails the capturing of CO2 and storing it underground. This prevents CO2 from accumulating in the atmosphere, where it traps heat and causes global warming.
The International Energy Agency said that annual carbon capture capacity needs to increase to 1.6 billion tonnes of CO2 by 2030 to meet the global target of net-zero emissions by 2050. This would help avert the catastrophic impact of climate change on countries and economies. However, the new report said carbon capture projects in the natural gas, industrial and power sectors were not effective in meeting the goal.
The study looked at 13 flagship carbon capture and storage projects in these sectors, which accounted for around 55 per cent of the total current operational capacity worldwide.
Mr Robertson, an energy finance analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, said that seven of the 13 projects underperformed, two failed, and one was mothballed.
"Carbon capture and storage technology has been going for 50 years and many projects have failed and continued to fail, with only a handful working," he added.
The reasons for underperformance are diverse, ranging from economic to engineering problems, said Mr Robertson.
For example, the ExxonMobil Shute Creek carbon capture plant in the United States - the world's biggest and longest-running carbon capture project - failed to reach its carbon capture capacity after operating for 35 years.
Only half the targeted CO2 was captured, while the remaining was released back into the atmosphere.
The facility commenced operations before climate change was a widespread public concern. Its principal purpose was to sell captured CO2 for oil recovery, where CO2 is pumped into dwindling oil fields to extract more oil. Some three-quarters of the CO2 captured annually by multibillion-dollar facilities globally - around 28 million tonnes out of 39 million tonnes - is reinjected into oil fields to push more oil out of the ground, Mr Robertson noted.
Asked if the newer carbon capture projects would likely be plagued by the same issues faced by the older ones, he said that the technology has not fundamentally changed and success rates continue to be mixed.
He cited the Gorgon carbon capture project in Australia as an example.
The problem is that much of the CO2 captured is being injected into oil fields to push more oil out of the ground.
Owned by Chevron, Shell and ExxonMobil, he noted that some of the best carbon capture and storage engineers in the world had worked on the project, and yet they could not get the facility to function properly.
Finding suitable CO2 storage sites and preventing CO2 from leaking back into the atmosphere are major challenges, the study said.
Mr Robertson gave the example of the In Salah carbon capture project in Algeria, which was suspended in 2011 after seven years of operations as there were concerns about the trapped CO2 escaping.
"Many international bodies and national governments are relying on carbon capture in the fossil fuel sector to get to net zero, and it simply won't work.
"Overall results show that these projects continue to overstate and underperform," said Mr Robertson.
Storegga is the lead developer of Britain's Acorn programme, which has a portfolio of projects including the capture and storage of CO2 in depleted oil and gas fields under the Central North Sea.
Its spokesman said that the CO2 stored some 2km below the seabed is not used for other commercial purposes.
"Enhanced oil recovery using CO2 is not a climate protection methodology," he said, adding that the Acorn CO2 storage licence precludes the use of CO2 for extracting oil.
Most major carbon capture and storage projects haven't met targets
Several of the world’s biggest projects capturing and storing carbon dioxide are significantly underperforming, according to an analysis showing some are capturing only half as much CO2 as promised.
A report published today analysed the performance of 13 flagship existing CCS schemes worldwide, which together represent 55 per cent of captured CO2, using figures published by the companies.
Most have captured much less CO2 than expected, the report found. Across its lifetime, the report says ExxonMobil’s LaBarge facility at Shute Creek in Wyoming has underperformed by around 36 per cent in terms of capacity. The world’s only large power station with CCS, Boundary Dam in Saskatchewan, Canada, has captured about 50 per cent less than planned, according to the report, and the capacity of Chevron’s Gorgon gas scheme in Western Australia has been about 50 per cent lower than planned in its first five years.
Two projects included in the report failed, including the Kemper coal CCS project in Mississippi, which was long delayed and construction was eventually abandoned in 2017.
Recommended video: Time to Charge for Carbon?
If we can pay to treat wastewater, why not waste carbon?
“Is CCS a solution to our climate woes? I would say no. More often than not, it doesn't actually work to its design capacity,” says Bruce Robertson at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), an Australian think tank, who is the author of the report.
The technology dates back to the 1970s, and in many cases is used to extract more oil from reservoirs rather than for curbing climate change by capturing CO2 for the long term. “They [the industry] say it’s an emerging sector. In actual fact it has been has been in operation for most of our lifetimes,” says Robertson. The underperformance of schemes isn't for want of financial or engineering resource, he adds. The Gorgon project alone cost AU$3.1 billion.
Read more: 10 finance firms effectively own half of all future carbon emissions
On a more positive note, the report finds the Sleipner and Snøhvit CCS projects in Norway have been a success, which it says is largely due to the country’s unique business and regulatory environment. Robertson says he concedes there may be a future role for CCS in heavy industries where emissions are hard to prevent, such as cement making.
Stuart Haszeldine at the University of Edinburgh in the UK says the IEEFA report is thorough, but that it is “too simple” to claim that CCS doesn't work. He says one reason CCS projects appear to be underperforming isn't the technology but a lack of market incentives for storing CO2, and an absence of good regulation. “CCS does and will work when the rules are correct,” says Haszeldine.
A spokesperson for Chevron says: “Innovation on this scale is not without its challenges, but the technology works.” An ExxonMobil spokesperson says: “The LaBarge facility has captured more CO2 than any other facility in the world to date.” Saskpower disputed the suggestion the Boundary Dam project had a capture rate of around 50 per cent, giving a figure of 68 per cent. Robertson says this discrepancy is due to the IEEFA assessing the project’s original capture rate target, rather than a revised, lower target.
