Oil industry touts emissions tech
Alberta can become world leader, CAPP tells climate-change panel
CALGARY The oil and gas industry wants investment in emissions-busting technologies to play a big role in Alberta’s climate-change strategy.
The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers has made its submission to the five-member panel working on a broad plan to reduce the province’s greenhouse gas emissions.
“Alberta can diversify its economy and become the global hub for the development of new emissions-cutting technologies that we can then export to the world’s oil and gas sector,” CAPP president Tim McMillan said in a release.
“In our generation, we can make Alberta’s oilpatch the high-tech environmental leader of the world.”
Alberta should set a target for technology investment over the next 10 years and invest funds from its soon-to-be-hiked carbon levy to develop and deploy those technologies, the group said.
In June, the NDP government announced the carbon price for large industrial emitters that exceed their allotment — now at $15 a tonne — would rise to $20 a tonne next year and $30 a tonne in 2017. Between that change and an increase in the corporate tax rate from 10 per cent to 12 per cent, CAPP estimates the industry faces $800 million in higher cost over two years.
The climate-change panel, headed by University of Alberta economist Andrew Leach, is tackling the province’s wider climate strategy, focusing not just on oil and gas, but on aspects like transportation and power, too.
The government has said it aims to have the architecture of a climate plan ready in time for the UN climate talks in Paris in December.
One of CAPP’s recommendations is to develop a clean infrastructure royalty credit program that would encourage adoption of green technologies without hurting the industry’s competitiveness. It also wants more power generation to come from natural gas, a cleanerburning fuel than coal, and to export it to countries like China..