Good read

Csrbon capture and storage..Many problems, but..

I have no illusions that Alberta will ever spend that money on that...

Tar sands, it already takes 1 barrel of oil to create 3 barrels or Alberta crude, now add in another barrel and a half and your return is negligible..

What you have is a continuation of saying anything and promising everything just keep the miners digging oil..

Have you seen the ads, green pastures, fast flowing rivers teeming with wildlife.

Delay, deny, defend, promise clean storage,...

And when some town gets gassed to death overnight then what.

Wasn`t there a town in Saskatchewan with the gas seeping back up in a hissy fit?

Meet the Kerr..s

In one location alone [Paul Lafleur, of Petro-Find Geochem] detected concentrations as high as 110,607 parts per million (ppm), twice the amount needed to asphyxiate a person. Near the Kerr's home he also recorded concentrations of 17,000 ppm, a level "that far exceed the threshold level for health concerns." As a consequence "CO2 could enter the home in dangerous concentrations through the crawl space due to negative pressures caused by a natural gas heating furnace."

Given that Cenovus's closest injection well lies a mile away from the Kerr home, Lafleur concluded that the CO2 was probably seeping through open fractures and faults that intersect the Weyburn field. In other words, there were cracks in the [carbon] cemetery.

In addition a Saskatchewan lab confirmed that the CO2 found at Kerr's place clearly originated from "the CO2 injected into the Weyburn reservoir

Here is another good read.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/01/co2-levels-leaking-canadian-carbon-storage-project-asphyxiate-you.php

At least death is painless...A slow tiredness and night night.

I say pump it the atmosphere.

You think that new 27 kilometer bridge in China will be carrying walkers or joggers..

Or what about the India state acquisition land grabs.

$6 dollars per acre and you must sell, farmland for strip malls, hundreds of miles of strip malls and manufacturing, and some think we can bury it all.

We must be mad!

Alberta: Mentally Challenged

What more can Alberta do to cement its reputation as Canada's stupidest Province? Alberta is looking more like Nigeria every day. The oil money is bypassing Alberta and Albertans are subsidizing foreign oil companies.

In other news this week, Edmonton school boards are laying off teachers because there is no money.

The putsch at AECL

[OFFENSIVE COMMENTS REMOVED] just gave Canada's $22B investment in nuke technology, the only possible answer to global warming, to a corporate crony in the Oil business SNC Lavalin, paying them $60M to take AECL.

SNC has announced it is laying of its research staff, abandoning the $2B spent developing the design complete ACR1000 reactor - the only Generation 3 reactor licensed to build in Canada - and will likely sell off the companies equipment to add to the windfall.

[UNSUBSTANTIATED COMMENTS REMOVED.]

High quality journalism

Many thanks to Mr. Nikiforuk and The Tyee for continuing to shine a probing journalistic light on energy issues in Alberta. I wonder how many Alberta newspapers, magazines and zines have asked to reprint the energy and equity series? Petro state indeed.

Carbon capture and storage

I have a novel carbon capture and storage solution: it's called a forest. Maybe we should look into having more of those, not less. It could save us a couple trillion dollars down the line.

Will Albertans have the same

Will Albertans have the same courage?
The answer is "no."

The first time I heard about carbon storage, I filed it under "B" for a "Bat-$@#" Crazy scheme, and I don't think I've been proven wrong, yet.

Nuke or fosfool

Seth, I rarely agreed with your perspective on nuclear power production, although the thorium reactor concept looks very interesting.

I don't think that the nuclear option is yet ripe, despite the CO2 emergency (remember the CFCs "all good" fiasco that took a mere 60 to 70 years to debunk with near catastrophic results, and it ain't over yet).

Nuclear deserves further study and development, but the problem is in the rush to market it before a thorough precautionary, transparent and unbiased evaluation of all facets of its long term use are recorded and released. The stakes are too high.

Nukes have been promoted in nearly the same ways as carbon sequestration, clean gas fracking, etc. Lots of hype but little precautionary warnings. Devil's in the details.

Never mind Japan, the floods in Missouri, the current wildfire very near to Los Alamos and such events require better (MORE EXPENSIVE) precautions prior to expanding such projects, rather than going on the cheap, and of course this makes it less profitable and competitive with other energy sources.

But I agree with you that this was a major sellout, similar to the 50s Avro aerospace industry (comparable job losses, etc.), not just to reduce competition to fossil fuel production, but with privatized political and short term financial benefits, by a government that is pinching pennies across the board (except those big oil and gas corporations). "Energy superpower", hmm, shorter term only, but longer than most politicians think of.

Nuclear failure modes

Are well understood today. We have over 70 years experience in running nuke plants and we know how they break and how to prevent it. The Fukushima accident in reactor designs 60 years old was predicted as a 99% probable event by engineering but corrupt regulators were paid off to do nothing. Fukushima's failure modes have been corrected in more modern reactors. In fact the modern plants crippled by the same regulators, run by the same company just down the beach hit by bigger waves survived without problem.

Similarly,the flooding problem on the Mississippi was a not an engineering oversight but ineffective regulation. Again the entire incident would not have occurred in a modern nuke plant.

Los Alamos problems, greatly exaggerated stem, from the facilities use in nuke weapons development and have nothing to do with nuke power.

Yes work needs to be done on improving and replacing the ancient nuke designs, but with modern designs there are no worries.

The US NRC the toughest regulator on earth which hasn't approved a new nuke in over 30 years, has accepted the engineering design that shows the AP1000 as designed risks one TMI meltdown accident (nobody killed) per unit every 5 million years.

Compared to the 3 million folks that die for certain every year the Big Oil and it's allies in the "green" movement can delay the fossil to nuke conversion, infinitesimal nuke risks are a foolish diversion from the need for action.

Saskatchewan the first guinea pig out of the gate-Part 1

The Boundary Dam Power Station just outside Estevan (SE Saskatchewan), a six boiler unit coal fired power plant, has been conducting a $5 million small scale pilot project for years. However, finding results of this pilot project is difficult but without any independent review from those not wedded to carbon capture and storage the Province and the Feds announce ramping it up.

The new project,rebuilding one of the six coal fired power plants, is a massive expansive of the very small scale pilot project. The Feds and Saskatchewan govt are financing this to the tune of $1.24 billion with barely a whimper from the residents of Saskatchewan.

Estevan is known as having the highest per capita rate of respiratory disease in Canada. There are two large coal fired power plants in the Estevan area, Boundary Dam with six units operating and Shand with one large unit. Boundary Dam began operations in 1959 with only two units and by 1978 it had six units operating. Shand, the newer of the two stations has one large unit built in 1992. Together these two plants provide 1/3 of Saskatchewan's power needs.

The coal these units burn is one of the dirtiest coals in North America and during the winter a brown stream of particulate and gases can be seen floating at low altitudes through the city and surrounding farm country. The new unit with CCS technology will only hide 1/3 of the total CO2 output from Boundary Dam Power Station.

Saskatchewan guinea pigs-Part II

As Nikiforuk has indicated, little has been done to ensure the long term safety of the sites where the CO2 is expected to be used underground for "enhanced oil recovery". There is no policy to ensure SaskPower, the government utility, will monitor the sites diligently in the short and long term.

And as Nikiforuk has stated the efficiency of the coal fired unit that is slated for a rebuild will be reduced by 25% as the unit will require more of its electrical energy output to operate the equipment to capture and compress the CO2. Efficiency of the unit in terms of providing power to the residents of Saskatchewan will be in the range of 55%! Hardly something one in the private sector would want to invest heavily in as the price of captured carbon gas to the oil and gas industry has yet to set. But those close to the action say that the oil and gas industry want the captured CO2 for nothing. Who is holding all the cards in this transaction? The Boundary Dam Power Station does not have the capacity to store large amounts of CO2 on its site so it has to transport the gas as quickly as it can to a destination. Will the government of Saskatchewan strong arm the oil and gas industry shove the carbon gas down the throats of the petro industry and threaten the wealth it now receives from royalties from the incredible expansion of that industry in the SE of the province.

So the good folks in Canada and Saskatchewan are financing this through their government's treasuries without any valid business plan in place to determine whether the loss of electrical energy from the plant that will be used to capture and compress the gas will be offset by the price paid by the oil and gas industry in Saskatchewan. Chalk one up for government ineptness but also to the oil and gas industry who once again will receive a heavy subsidy, through CCS, and will not be required to monitor their "enhanced oil recovery" sites on a long term basis. The monitoring will be left up to the good people of Saskatchewan who have been fed nothing but bull chips throughout the CCS bumpf.

At the public trough once again is the Canadian government's darling corporation, SNC Lavalin, who will be managing the Boundary Dam project. SNC Lavalin, or rather a subsiduary, is the private operator of the Canada Line in Vancouver, the operator of several large office buildings that house the federal government, runs or used to run most of the Afghanistan Canadian military infrastructure and of course the parent company has been involved in many of the large scale transportation infrastructure projects in BC other than the Canada Line. In short, they are Canada's Halliburton.

SNC is no guinea pig but they sure like feeding from the trough.