Thanks

What Prentice actually said is “Carbon capture is feasible presently. Carbon capture is employed in the Weyburn project which again is a Canada-U.S. project.” But later, he says

“Its commercial application to coalburning thermal electricity plants and also facilities such as oilsands facilities still requires work and that is why the prime minister and the president announced they would be collaborating on this.”

Hmmm, it's proven but its application requires work. The fact is it's never been used in thermal plants or for bitumen upgrading and for a simple reason: thermodynamics and economics make it virtually impossible. That HAS been proven. In most cases it would require so much additional energy that it would be cheaper to put up wind turbines.

The solution is simple. Tax carbon emissions to give CCS a fair chance of competing in the marketplace. Don't subsidize the oil companies. If CCS loses out to renewables or conservation, that's capitalism.

http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/sclefkowitz/oba…

There was significant confusion as noted above about carbon capture and sequestration (CCS)technology for the tar sands. The President never in fact endorsed this as a strategy for the tar sands but Environment Minister Prentice and Alberta Premier jumped on this as a way forward for expansion of the tar sands and that is alarming. CCS in the tar sands poses additional challenges, as described by NRDC's expert in CCS here:

http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/gperidas/boreal…

That’s not to say that technology cannot reduce the carbon emissions from the tar sands, but it will be harder, more expensive and as such will likely take longer. And do we really have faith that Canadian governments and regulators will impose those standards? Their track record to date is far from encouraging. Passing the batton to them while we bless tar sands development dressed in a technological fix cloak would be a huge mistake.

Perhaps more importantly, carbon capture and sequestration cannot absolve the tar sands’ countless other environmental and social sins. Unless industry and government prove that they can effectively deal with those too (almost an impossible test if one looks at the damage to Canada's Boreal forest), tar sands oil should not be given a place in a 21st century energy system. Other sustainable and responsible options for fueling our transportation abound and merit more attention for investment than a questionable technological fix.

In the early 1970s the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission announced that a salt mine, at Lyons, Kansas, would be developed as a high-level radioactive waste repository, only to reverse its decision after Kansas State geologists discovered the site was riddled with abandoned oil and gas exploration boreholes.

If riddled hydrocarbon formations cannot hold nuclear waste they most certainly cannot hold pressurized Carbon Dioxide.

The consequence of a sudden release of CO2 was demonstrated in 1986 at Lake Nyos,

Alberta’s bitumen is already marginal without adding the cost of sequestration.

Spent nuclear fuel produces enough free, carbon-free energy to produce 6 billion barrels of bitumen annually. Its use would make the oil sands viable even at current oil prices.

A recently published study by Australian, French, Canadian and U.S. scientists notes the unprecedented capacity of bitumen to sequester radioactive materials and much of Canada’s oil sands are found beneath a capping shale formation that would further preclude either hydrocarbons or radionuclides from migrating to the surface. Such a use is technically indistinguishable from geothermal energy, which is widely acknowledged to be an environmentally sound approach to generating energy.

The solution of the waste problem unleashes the potential for nuclear power to supplant coal in the production of electricity. This waste can then be recycled a second time, in a hundred years, when the heat producing and most radioactive fission products have be decayed. Reactors like Canada’s CANDU can burn most of this fuel as is without further reprocessing.

Professor Arsenio Leon Cota.