If you listened to some of its more vocal critics, you might think Alberta’s energy sector isn’t just responsible for contributing to climate change, but actually creating it in the first place.
And while there’s still plenty of work to be done in improving its environmental performance, much has already been done – with money that came out of the industry’s pocket.
That’s because Alberta has had a small carbon tax since 2007, the funds from which have gone into the Climate Change and Emissions Management Corporation (CCEMC) and been invested in ambitious early-stage technologies that reduce the province’s carbon emissions.
Kirk Andries, the CCEMC’s managing director, says it’s all about swinging for the fences. “We don’t want to throw our money at projects that would happen anyway. We want to throw money at projects where it makes a difference.”
Andries will run a workshop on overcoming barriers to innovation at the Canada 3.0 conference in Calgary Oct. 28-30. The event is being held in partnership with the Canadian Energy Supply Chain Forum.
The CCEMC has already funded about 100 projects, 10 of which have been completed and 90 of which are still in the process of being developed and deployed.
Then there’s the international Grand Challenge, which seeded 24 projects with $500,000 grants last year and will fund up to five different winners with $3 million each in the next round, scheduled to begin in September 2015.
From that group, a final winner – the one with the best chance of annually reducing GHG emissions in Alberta by one net megaton – will be awarded a $10-million grant in 2018.
So which fences is CCEMC encouraging project proponents to swing for, exactly? Its work concentrates on three key areas: carbon capture and storage (both biological and geological storage); greening energy production; and conservation and energy efficiency.
The Grand Challenge, meanwhile, is focused squarely on innovative carbon uses. CCEMC funding has gone into a wide range of projects with an even wider range of partners and proponents, from one that combines German technology and animal waste from Lethbridge to create the first bio-gas plant in Canada, to an innovative partnership between two oil-and-gas giants (Suncor Energy and Nexen) and a telecommunications company out of Florida.
In that particular partnership, the proponents are out to prove that a combination of electromagnetic heating and solvent can replace water in the SAGD (steam-assisted gravity drainage) technique that’s currently used to extract bitumen from deeper deposits – and reduce associated greenhouse gases by 80 per cent in the process.
“For us that is truly transformative,” Andries says, “because the in-situ oilsands resource in Alberta is largely undeveloped. Most of the oilsands development has occurred in the mining area, which is about 20 per cent of all the reserves. In situ is 80 per cent, and we’re just starting to scratch the surface of getting at that. This could be an exceptionally good project to really bend the curve in terms of greenhouse gas emissions relative to the baseline.”
CCEMC has contributed more than $16 million to that particular project. So what happens if it proves to be a technological success – and therefore a commercial one as well?
“We would be more than thrilled if the technologies get commercialized and broadly deployed; in fact, that is our agenda – find these and help to accelerate commercialization,” Andries says. “Move them along the innovation chain and the technology readiness scale as quickly as possible, and have them broadly deployed.”
There’s a catch, though. In exchange for both the funding and the hands-off approach to the intellectual property that money is helping to create, CCEMC requires that proponents make the technology as widely available as possible.
“We won’t fund a project if somebody wants to do this work and then achieve competitive advantage and not share it with anybody,” he says. “That would be out of scope for us. It’s fine to make money on your technology, but you can’t save it for yourself – it has to be broadly deployed.”