PACE Advisor Myles Allen published this article in Corporate Knights urging both environmentalists and the oil industry to accept the necessity of developing and implementing solutions that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Environmentalists are often resistant to technologies like carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS) because they see this as a way to justify continued reliance oil and gas. On the other hand, the oil industry only works on decarbonization when the effort is largely subsidized by taxpayer dollars.

From the article:

All that said, everyone talking about “decarbonized oil” needs to level with Canadians about what it means. Capturing the carbon dioxide generated in the production and refining of fossil fuels is the obvious place to start – but it is only a start. We will also need to dispose of the carbon dioxide generated when fossil fuels are used. If that use is for road transport or aviation, that means recapturing it back out of the atmosphere. Technologies exist to do this, but they need to be scaled up.

Disposing of carbon dioxide responsibly is more expensive than just dumping it into the atmosphere: which is why the Pathways CCS project in Alberta is costing $16 billion dollars. But part of the reason CCS is so expensive is the way it is funded: through taxpayer subsidies. If the government asks an industry how much they need to get rid of carbon dioxide, what company would say they can do it cheaply?

Read the full article here.