From the Canadian Energy Centre

Pipeline front-end engineering and design to be complete by end of year

Canada’s largest oil sands companies continue to advance a major proposed carbon capture and storage (CCS) network in northeast Alberta, including filing regulatory applications, conducting engineering and design, doing environmental surveys and consulting with local communities.   

Members of the Pathways Alliance – a group of six companies representing 95 per cent of oil sands production – are also now closer to ordering the steel for their proposed CO2 pipeline.   

“We have gone out to potential pipe suppliers and asked them to give us proposals on costs and timing because we do see this as a critical path going forward,” Imperial Oil CEO Brad Corson told analysts on November 1.  

He said the next big milestone is for the Pathways companies to reach an agreement with the federal and provincial governments on an economic framework to proceed.  

“Once we have the right economic framework in place, then we will be in a position to go order the line pipe that we need for this 400-kilometre pipeline.” 

Pathways – which also includes Suncor Energy, Canadian Natural Resources, Cenovus Energy, MEG Energy and ConocoPhillips Canada – is proposing to build the $16.5 billion project to capture  emissions from oil sands facilities and transport them to an underground storage hub. 

The project was first announced in 2022 but Pathways had not provided recent public updates. The organization had stopped advertising and even briefly shut down its website during the summer in wake of the federal government’s amendments to the Competition Act in June.  

Those changes include explicit provisions on the need to produce “adequate and proper testing” to substantiate environmental benefit claims. Critics say the provisions could lead to frivolous lawsuits and could or even scuttle the very projects that Canada is relying on to slash greenhouse gas emissions.  

In early December, the Alberta Enterprise Group (AEG) and the Independent Contractors and Businesses Association jointly filed a constitutional challenge against the federal government over the new “greenwashing” rules, which they say unreasonably restrict free speech. 

“These regulations pre-emptively ban even truthful, reasonable and defensible discussion unless businesses can meet a government-imposed standard of what is the truth,” said AEG president Catherine Brownlee. 

Pathways has since restored its website, and president Kendall Dilling said the organization and its member companies continue working directly with governments and communities along the corridors of the proposed CCS project. 

Canadian Natural Resources began filing the regulatory applications to the Alberta Energy Regulator on behalf of Pathways earlier in the year. The company has so far submitted 47 pipeline agreement applications along with conservation and reclamation plans in seeking approvals for the CO2 transportation network. 

Pathways has also continued consultation and engagement activities with local communities and Indigenous groups near its pipeline corridors and storage hubs. 

“Engagement is ongoing with local communities, Indigenous groups and landowners, as well as a consultation process with Indigenous groups in accordance with Aboriginal Consultation Office requirements,” Dilling says.  

An environmental field program that began in 2021 continues to survey the network’s project areas. 

“Environmental field studies are ongoing and we are supporting Indigenous groups in completing traditional land use studies,” Dilling says.  

“Studies are supported by hundreds of heritage resource assessments, wetland classifications, soil assessments, aquatic habitat evaluations and other environmental activities.” 

In addition to working with governments and communities, Pathways expects front-end engineering and design on the proposed 400-kilometre-plus main transportation line and more than 250 kilometres of connecting pipelines to be complete by the end of this year.  

Pathways has also drilled two test wells in the proposed storage hub and plans to drill another two or three evaluation wells in the final quarter of 2024. 

From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

Outgoing President Joe Biden announced a new climate target of reducing American carbon emissions from 61-66% over the next decade, even though President Trump would be able to undo it as soon as next month.

Outgoing President Joe Biden announced December 19 a new climate target of reducing American carbon emissions of more than 60% over the next decade, even though returning President Donald Trump would be able to undo it as soon as next month.

“Today, as the United States continues to accelerate the transition to a clean energy economy, President Biden is announcing a new climate target for the United States: a 61-66 percent reduction in 2035 from 2005 levels in economy-wide net greenhouse gas emissions,” the White House announced, the Washington Free Beacon reports. The new target will be formally submitted to the United Nations Climate Change secretariat.

“President Biden’s new 2035 climate goal is both a reflection of what we’ve already accomplished,” Biden climate adviser John Podesta added, “and what we believe the United States can and should achieve in the future.”

The announcement may be little more than a symbolic gesture in the end, however, as Trump is widely expected to withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement upon resuming office in January, in the process voiding related climate obligations.

Trump formally pulled out of the Paris accords in August 2017, the first year of his first term, with then-U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley stating that the administration would be “open to re-engaging in the Paris Agreement if the United States can identify terms that are more favorable to it, its business, its workers, its people, and its taxpayers.”

Such terms were never reached, however, leaving America out until Biden re-committed the nation to the Paris Agreement on the first day of his presidency, obligating U.S. policy to new economic regulations to cut carbon emissions.

In June, the Trump campaign confirmed Trump’s intentions to withdraw from Paris again. At the time, Trump’s team was reportedly mulling a number of non-finalized drafts of executive orders to do so.

Left-wing consternation on the matter is based on certitude in “anthropogenic global warming” (AGW) or “climate change,” the thesis that human activity, rather than natural phenomena, is primarily responsible for Earth’s changing climate and that such trends pose a danger to the planet in the form of rising sea levels and weather instability.

Activists have long claimed there is a “97 percent scientific consensus” in favor of AGW, but that number comes from a distortion of an overview of 11,944 papers from peer-reviewed journals, 66.4 percent of which expressed no opinion on the question; in fact, many of the authors identified with the AGW “consensus” later spoke out to say their positions had been misrepresented.

AGW proponents suffered a blow in 2010 with the discovery that their leading researchers at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, East Anglia Climate Research Unit, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had engaged in widespread data manipulation, flawed climate models, misrepresentation of sources, and suppression of dissenting findings in order to make the so-called “settled science” say what climate activists wanted it to.