money for nothing

Pathways Alliance (Canadian Natural, Cenovus, ConocoPhillips, Imperial, MEG Energy & Suncor) represent 95% of oilsands production, and have a public relations campaign called Let's clear the air, with the unlikely goal of reaching net-zero by 2050. The first stage of the plan intends to reduce the group’s yearly CO2 emissions by 22 megatons (Mt), and includes a 400 kilometre carbon capture, transport and storage system. The costs are discussed in their November 2022 press release:

With anticipated co-funding support from Canadian governments, Pathways Alliance recently announced plans to invest $24.1 billion before 2030 in the first phase of its plan.

Approximately $16.5 billion will support a proposed carbon capture and storage network in northeastern Alberta that, when constructed, will be among the largest facilities in the world. Another $7.6 billion investment is planned on major emissions reduction projects and technologies.
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A decrease of 22 Mt sounds like a lot but international anthropogenic CO2 emissions are about 36 gigatons (Gt) per year, so the proposed Pathways Alliance reduction would only be 0.06% of world-wide emissions. To put the impact of that potential 0.06% in perspective, a November 2021 report from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratories sets out that despite a 5.4% drop in global CO2 emissions due to Covid in 2020, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere continued to grow at about the same rate as in preceding years.

In trying to account for this, NASA researchers suggest: First, while the 5.4% drop in emissions was significant, the growth in atmospheric concentrations was within the normal range of year-to-year variation caused by natural processes. Also, the ocean didn’t absorb as much CO2 from the atmosphere as it has in recent years – probably in an unexpectedly rapid response to the reduced pressure of CO2 in the air at the ocean’s surface.

So, CO2 from natural processes was up (but in the normal variation range) yet low levels of CO2 caused the oceans to not absorb as much of it … huh? Another more plausible reason why the rate of increase didn’t change is that a drop of 5.4% in anthropogenic CO2 emissions is just too small an amount to have a measurable effect on combined natural and man-made CO2 concentrations. Whatever the cause, the fact remains that a major interruption to world economies and lifestyles took place without producing even a ripple in the degree of atmospheric CO2 accumulation.

The oilsands’ plan is to spend $24.1 billion of somebody’s money to achieve a 0.06% drop in global emissions. This reduction would be just 1/90th of the 5.4% world-wide emissions reduction in 2020 that didn’t even register on the CO2 charts. As quoted, Pathways Alliance expects financial support for their proposal from the federal and provincial governments, therefore the taxpayer will be on the hook for that. No doubt the remainder will eventually be recovered by the oil companies from price adjustments paid for by those same taxpayers through increased cost of goods and services. All this Canadian financial pain will likely achieve nothing other than maybe an “attaboy” from the United Nations.
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Hopefully Pathways Alliance is just posturing to take some of the green heat off the oil patch, and this plan will never come to fruition. Wasting such huge sums in order to appear corporately virtuous, while the average citizen can’t make ends meet, is shameful.