Oilpatch needs a transformation, not a transition

When I was a teenager, I babysat for a family where the wife was the main breadwinner because her husband lost his job as a typewriter repairman. I remember thinking, “He should learn how to repair computers.”

I don't know what work he ended up doing, but there wasn't a “just transition” task force to focus on the plight of out-of-work typewriter technicians. Indeed, there was no need. More jobs were created in the digital revolution than there ever were in typewriters.

That's why it's puzzling that the federal government would launch a Just Transition consultation now. It's either sloganeering on the eve of an election to try to win green votes, or they really do intend to cause massive job losses among our energy workers if they get re-elected.

The discussion document cites the Paris Agreement that calls on signatories to take into account “the imperatives of a just transition of the workforce” and also points out that the Liberal government has accelerated plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40 to 45 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030.

What does that entail? Greenhouse gas emissions were about 740 megatonnes in 2005. That means the government wants us to be at 405 Mt by 2030. As of 2019 (the most recent statistics available), we were at 730 Mt. So, in the first 15 years, we reduced emissions by 10 Mt. Now we are apparently going to reduce emissions by 325 Mt in the next 10 years.

Do you see how this might be a problem? There is only one possible way this aggressive target can be reached, and it's not even mentioned in the discussion document. It's carbon capture, utilization and storage.

There is an emerging view in the energy sector that the hydrocarbon industry needs to transform, not transition, by treating emissions in a circular fashion.

Have you heard wood biomass being described as carbon neutral? If you plant an equivalent amount of trees to compensate for the amount of wood that is going to be burned, you have created a circular cycle for emissions.

The same thinking can apply to fossil fuels using these three Rs: reduce, reuse and return.

We can reduce emissions by retrofitting homes and buying zero-emissions vehicles, including hydrogen cars, which are some of the ideas mentioned in the report.

We can reuse emissions by capturing carbon dioxide and turning it into useful products such as carbon fibre, cement, industrial minerals, ethylene and propylene. Demonstration projects already exist that are doing this.

And we can return emissions underground by either capturing from the air, a process being developed by Carbon Engineering, or capturing them at the source, a process pioneered at Boundary Dam in Saskatchewan, and storing it underground.

I've spoken to Mike Monea, the global expert for carbon capture and storage (CCS) deployment behind the Boundary Dam project, and he tells me Alberta likely has enough capacity to capture all of Canada's emissions and more. Imagine that. We could start charging the rest of Canada and even the rest of the world for the service of capturing and storing their emissions.

So why wasn't this mentioned in the Just Transition document? Maybe it has something to do with a letter penned by 500 of the usual suspects who hate fossil fuels so much they don't want the industry to have any role in engineering the solution.

In a letter to the U.S. Congress and Canadian Parliament, this group says carbon capture and storage is “at odds with a just energy transition and the principles of environmental justice,” whatever that means. They also say “we don't need to fix fossil fuels, we need to ditch them.”

We need to be aware of this extreme element in the environmental movement. They don't want to fix the problem, they just said so. They have another agenda, which is to simply kill our traditional energy industry.

We need to reject this kind of extreme thinking. Wind and solar are not carbon neutral until concrete, steel, fibreglass, crystalline silicon, rare earth minerals, metals like copper and aluminum, and heavy equipment transportation are carbon neutral.

Our energy workers will have plenty of opportunities for new jobs as long as politicians don't obstruct the real solutions.