Amy Taylor, Director of Alberta Energy Solutions with the Pembina
Institute, made the following statement in response to the announcement
that the governments of Alberta and Canada will provide an $865 million
subsidy to Shell’s Quest Carbon Capture & Storage (CCS) project,
covering 65 percent of the total cost:
“This is a very significant subsidy for one of the world’s largest
and most profitable oil companies, and the government needs to take
steps to ensure that polluters soon start shouldering the full cost of
CCS deployment.
“Canada urgently needs regulations that put a price on pollution
high enough to compel polluters to invest their own money in the
deployment of technologies like CCS. This will be a key test for the
federal announcement on cap-and-trade expected in the coming weeks.
“In parallel to its support for CCS, the government needs to support
a massive scale-up in renewable energy and energy efficiency, the most
sustainable solutions to climate change. Unfortunately the federal
government has ceased
support for renewable energy development in Canada, failing to
renew the ecoENERGY for Renewable Power program in the last budget. In
sharp contrast, President Obama’s recovery and reinvestment package
included $27 billion of support for renewable energy, almost 14 times more per person
than Canada’s economic stimulus package.
“If Canada remains singularly focused on ‘end of pipe’ solutions
like CCS for the fossil fuel sector while largely ignoring renewable
energy and energy efficiency, we will be poorly positioned to compete
in the clean energy economy.”
###
The Pembina Institute is a non-partisan sustainable energy think
tank. The Pembina Institute’s perspective on carbon capture and storage
is available at http://www.pembina.org/pub/1787
For more information, contact:
Amy Taylor, Director of Alberta Energy Solutions
The Pembina Institute
Cell: 403-996-0510
Email: amyt@pembina.org
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