News
Apr 03, 2009Excess Government Money for Carbon Capture Could Be Used to Develop Geothermal in Alberta
You can view the original article “Oilsands opts out of carbon capture” by clicking here
Why do we insist on carbon capture when we could have carbon prevention at a lower price?
The energy industry has passed a significant vote of non-confidence against carbon capture and sequestration this week, refusing to accept their share of $2 billion dollars to advance the technology in Alberta’s oil sands. Now the focus turns to the other salient options to curtail Alberta’s unsettling carbon footprint at a utility scale.
Nuclear power generation is Alberta’s next potential solution in queue. However, we should be reminded that nuclear power is not a mitigation of pollution as much as it is accepting pollution in a deferred and ostensibly palatable form. Bringing nuclear into question also engages additional opposition from the environmental front, where carbon capture and sequestration, in principle, did not offer considerable cause for concern.
For a minute fraction of the cost that Alberta is willing to assume for CCS technology, there is a third option the government can explore for reductions in CO2 emissions. This time we venture even deeper underground to harness geothermal energy, the natural source of heat that leaks through Earth’s crust. By conservative estimates, Alberta can produce 500 Megawatts of geothermal electricity which has a levelized cost competitive with coal. Harnessing this zero-emission resource could annually offset 2.7 Megatonnes of CO2 emissions, and this figure will rise as geothermal technologies improve. For less than 1 percent of what the government is offering to CCS, Alberta could institute a pilot program to co-produce petroleum alongside geothermal power.
In these times we need to make prudent choices about energy especially in view of our environmental and economic peril. If Alberta produces even a fraction of our zero-emissions geothermal power at a cost competitive with coal, it is certainly worthwhile to invest government money to support Albertan geothermal power technologies. We have to confront the emissions crisis from all practical angles, and when it comes to geothermal power, we have to look deeper than originally thought.
