Weyburn, Sask. CO2 Leak Is Good News For A Real CCS Alternative

A dead bird lies on the soil on a Weyburn, Sask. farm
A Saskatchewan farm couple whose land lies over the world's largest carbon capture and storage [CCS] project says greenhouse gases that were supposed to have been injected permanently underground are leaking out, killing animals and sending groundwater foaming to the surface. It's a story with global implications, potentially bad ones, for the energy sector.

Governments around the world, along with multinational corporate partners in the fossil fuel industry, are spending billions of dollars to research and develop methods to capture carbon dioxide emissions and storing the CO2 in deep underground wells. The carbon capture and storage project in Weyburn, Saskatchewan, has been cited as a world-leading example and Harper's Tories have bet $2 billion taxpayer dollars on CCS. This failure of their pet CCS project should have the Tories and their oily industry buddies worried.

The fossil fuel industry has one goal, shareholder profits. Governments around the world should have different criteria. This Weyburn project, as with thousands of others globally, was designed to increase the flow of oil whose production was rapidly diminishing. It was never designed as a CCS facility, it doesn't have even the basic impermeable caprock required by geologists. But when the government shovels money in the oily boys have visions of sugar dancing in their heads.

It's the fossil fuel industry interests that limit our governments' field of view. There are other ways to capture and store CO2 and other greenhouses gases that are proven technologies, that are safe and sane. Algal Synthesis offers consumption of the full cocktail of greenhouse gases normally found in smokestack emissions - not just CO2 as is the case with most CCS proposals. Mineral storage is totally safe and has millions of years of data-it is how limestone is formed. Another is the production of methanol from the CO2 already in the atmosphere.

One day perhaps we clever primates will figure out how to dig our way out of the hole we're in, but right now our only choice is to be real conservatives, to conserve, to want less.