There’s a story in the Calgary Herald today about the Science Alberta Foundation’s new on-line game CO2 Connection that is aimed at teaching children about carbon capture and storage (CCS).
The game has you building pipelines and bridges all across Alberta in order to help Kelvin and his trusty pal Celsius take on “the noble task of reducing Alberta’s carbon footprint.”
Except what Kelvin and his pal are doing in the game – pumping the CO2 underground to push more oil out to the surface, also known as Enhanced Oil Recovery and which happens to be the business model for the corporate sponsor that paid to develop the game - won’t actually reduce Alberta’s carbon footprint.
Greenpeace’s position is that CCS is an expensive and risky distraction that undermines real solutions to climate change.
But for the sake of argument, let’s assume for the moment that it works, and that the gases will stay underground for millennia, even though we’re putting them (under high pressure) into a reservoir that we’ve already punched a bunch of holes in to get the oil out and where they will be acidifying the water that is down there. Further, we’ll ignore the enormous amounts of energy (and hence carbon dioxide emissions) required to pressurize and pump the gases half-way across the province. And the fact that the federal and provincial government’s own research found that for Canada’s fastest rising source of emissions, the tar sands, “only a small portion of the CO2 streams are currently amenable for CCS due to both the size of the emissions streams and the concentrations.”
For the moment, we’ll just use the data from the Alberta government’s Task Force on implementing CCS. On page 25, it notes that:
“The study identified, at oil prices above $125 per barrel, the ultimate potential to recover an additional 3.5 billion barrels of oil, which would more than double Alberta’s remaining established reserves of conventional crude oil, while providing the capacity to sequester more than 1,100 Mt of CO2.”
Stay with me for a moment, math-phobes. There are about 430 kg of CO2 released when a barrel of oil is burned in cars, planes, etc. So if you multiply that by the 3.5 billion barrels of oil which otherwise would stay in the ground, then you have 1,505 Mt of CO2 going into the atmosphere. This is more than the 1,100 Mt of CO2 that was pumped underground, so we have net increase in atmospheric concentrations of CO2 as a result of this operation.
Which makes going beyond oil look pretty good. And building those green alternatives would probably be a better game for the kids.