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Posted 2025.12.15

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Canada's Projects in the National Interest - (an Econogics Series) © 2025

The Canada-Alberta Memorandum of Understanding signed November 27, 2025 (MOU)

The driver for posting this today is the announcement of the Canada-Alberta Memorandum of Understanding signed recently (2025.11.27) in Calgary by Prime Minister Mark Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith.

While I have concerns about the MOU, some of which are laid out below, I'm addressing just a couple in depth in this post, notably the treatment of CCUS as some kind of climate change panacea, and not addressing the state of marine oil spill response, recovery and remediation in Canadian waters.

CCUS

It's time for someone to call shenanigans on the entire mythinformation propaganda smokescreen around Carbon Capture Utilization and Storage. For lack of others stepping up, I guess that's going to be me.
In particular, the closing phrase of the first paragraph:
"through innovation and intergovernmental cooperation, be a source of clean energy to lower global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.", and specifically naming CCUS as a key part of the solution for low carbon intensity oil and LNG.

The idea that Alberta is going to produce more oil and deliver it to market while lowering global greenhouse gas emissions is simply nonsensical to me. It's worse than a charade, it's simply false with disingenuous window dressing.

Speaking of charades, let's start with what those four words actually mean.

First word, Carbon. CCUS projects in the real world don't store carbon. They store carbon dioxide. At standard temperature and pressure (close to real world conditions on most of the surface of Planet Earth), carbon is a black solid. Carbon dioxide is an invisible gas. Different: black vs. transparent; solid vs. gas. Not a greenhouse gas vs. the predominant greenhouse gas. When something containing carbon is burned to produce CO₂, energy is produced (heat, light). Energy is consumed to break down CO₂ into oxygen and carbon. Let's stop pretending carbon and carbon dioxide are synonymous.

Second word, Capture. Capture means to take and have control over or to grasp. Though, in this case, it's more like retain. This carbon dioxide isn't free in the wild, or outside the control of the party doing the 'capturing'. That party is directly producing the carbon dioxide. It's like saying a farmer captures manure, when in fact, their operations produce it as a byproduct. A farmer can use manure as a soil amendment. Industry producing carbon dioxide can reuse it in making beer or soft drinks or dry ice or many other commercial applications.

Third word, Utilization. It means use. So this isn't about permanent storage; it's about using the carbon dioxide. In this case, for Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) - extending the life of an aging oil or gas field to produce more oil and gas, and MORE GHG emissions.

Fourth word, Storage. Pretty self-explanatory.

If you think the order of the wording is a bit strange, it's because the oil and gas industry corrupted the previous term - CCS for Carbon Capture and Sequestration - and hoped nobody would notice the change when they inserted the 'U' and changed what the S stood for.

Sequestration is not the same as Storage. Storage implies an intention to take the stored material out again, like a storage closet, or a storage unit. Sequestration means locking something up in a very permanent way, as a jury can be sequestered for the entire duration of a trial. In this case, we're thinking in terms of the duration of life forms on this planet which have evolved over a stable climate period of about 10,000 years - prior to the 1900s or as in for geological periods of time, like many millennia. Think eons, epochs. Not like, I'm going to store the milk in the fridge. More like, I'm going to sequester the carbon by making it into limestone and physically build a geologic era on it.

The original purpose of sequestering carbon dioxide (CO₂) was to remove the dominant greenhouse gas from the atmosphere to reduce planetary warming to a small degree on a very long-term basis.

The purpose of CCUS is to produce more oil and gas from aging wells facing depletion. This has always been the primary goal of CCUS; CO₂ just happened to be a waste product the fossil fuel industry was already producing, and by claiming to reduce GHG emissions by pumping it underground, they got taxpayer money to get rid of that specific pollution problem. The Weyburn-Midale Fact Sheet (Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage Project) says: "CO2 injected at Weyburn and Midale totals 3 million tonnes per year" and "The CO2 injection is in 2 sites, Cenovus Energy owned Weyburn field and Apache owned Midale field. The EOR has increased production from Cenovus's Weyburn field by 16,000-28,000 barrels a day and by 2,300 to 5,800 barrels a day for Apache's Midale field."

Let's assume the typical values from that quote are 22,000 bpd from Weyburn and 4,000 bpd from Midale for a total of 26,000 bpd. Assuming 160 litres of hydrocarbon products are produced per barrel. For simplicity, let's assume it's all gasoline. For each litre of gasoline burned, 2.3 kg of CO₂ are produced just by the combustion process, along with some other pollutants and GHGs like nitrous-oxides. Re-working the math back up the chain, using (burning) that 26,000 bpd of oil results in 2,511,600 kg of CO₂ - per day - for decades of production.
(26,000 bpd x 42 litres gasoline/barrel x 2.3 kg CO₂/litre = 2,511,600 kg CO₂ or 2,511 tonnes or 2.511 kilotonnes PER DAY.
In a year, that's 916.515 kilotonnes, or about a megatonne. Or about 1/3 of the "3 million tonnes [megatonnes] per year" injected. The CO₂ produced from burning the additional oil produced (per the industry's numbers) will remain in the atmosphere for about a century.

That doesn't include the amount of injected CO₂ which returns to the surface in the produced oil, gas and produced water from the extraction operations, which doesn't appear to be measured.

It also doesn't include emissions via the pincushion effect.

It also doesn't include fugitive emissions from pipelines taking the CO₂ from the capture source to the depleted oil and gas fields where the injection is taking place, including interim storage, or emissions from the energy used to pump the CO₂ gas through the pressurized pipeline.

It also doesn't include the emissions from the energy used to pressurize the CO₂ gas into a liquid, and the energy used to pump the liquid into the oil field geological formation.

And yet, somehow, the politicians think this is a CO₂ REDUCTION measure. (The fossil foolers know it isn't a GHG reduction mechanism; that's why they don't show this math in their grand statements about carbon capture.) An actual CO₂ reduction measure would be based on not burning stuff to make more CO₂, like shifting electric power generation off fossil fuels and substituting less expensive renewable energy plus storage as a robust, reliable, lower cost, and fast-to-deploy solution.

Since FutureGen, Carbon dioxide capture and sequestration has failed to live up to its billing.

It's long chain of CCS/CCUS projects since FutureGen - inevitably funded by taxpayers - to keep the fantasy alive that this time the industry will get it right, when the real objective is to delay effective greenhouse gas regulations and extract and sell more fossil fuels in the interim. As of December 2025, the latest instalment comes from Australia.
Carbon capture was spruiked as a way of limiting our emissions – but has Australia been greenwashed? (The Guardian)
"Despite billions in investment and backing from the [Australian] federal government, carbon capture and storage technology 'should be in no way treated as a climate solution', critics say"

State of Marine Oil Spill Response in Canada

While the MOU appears to bring an end to the Tanker Moratorium for the northern BC Coast, it does not speak to requiring Alberta or the oil industry to implement a serious spill response capability or capacity for diluted bitumen spills which are likely to happen there if the additional Pacific port is located in that area. There is no point in building oil or gas pipelines to the coast unless you're planning to load the oil (dilbit) or gas (LNG) onto ships. That means tankers, and that means risk of spills.

The industry did put out a BOE puff piece titled "Oil tanker traffic surges but spills stay at zero after Trans Mountain Expansion" in the same time frame as the announcement of the MOU. In short, thank goodness for the profit motive of the international maritime shipping insurance industry (to avoid future massive oil spills for which it was being found increasing expensively liable), which started using double-walled oil tankers in 1990 as the tanker industry slowly scrapped its older tanker ships as they aged out. (Not a Canadian or oil production industry initiative; an insurance industry driven response.)

Despite the tone of the puff piece, doubled-hulled tankers are not a guarantee that spills will not occur.
Tanker Aegean Sea oil spill near the Spanish Galcian coast 1992 NTSB Report Eagle Otome Collision (NTSB)
MT Bunga Kelana 3 2010 accident and oil spill (Wikipedia)
How Do Major Spills Still Happen With Double Hull Tankers (Ship and Bunker 2018)
With a couple of minutes and a web search tool, you can find more.
A Review of Double Hull Tanker Oil Spill Prevention Considerations Prince William Sound RCAC (Nuka Research Report)
And if you really want to go through the looking glass and into the briar patch on the double-hulled spill reduction mythology, read Appendix D.2 of The Tankship Tromedy: The Impending Disasters in Tankers - Second Edition (2006)

However, the article completely ignored the failure of Canada's marine spill response regime to respond effectively to two refined oil product spills on the Canadian Pacific coast in recent years, because the incidents did not involve double-hulled oil tankers.

The MV Marathassa - a dry bulk carrier, not an oil tanker - spilled approximately 3,000 litres of bunker fuel into English Bay in April 2015. The spill site in English Bay is less than 10 km from the WCMRC base in Vancouver Harbour - the primary response organization for marine oil spills on the Canadian Pacific coast. Despite this, according to a lessons learned report on the spill, it took 14 hours for local emergency officials to be notified by the Coast Guard of the incident, and 6 DAYS for samples to be collected for official environmental monitoring. Spilled fuel was found on shorelines 12 km away from the spill site - and this was less than 3,000 litres of fuel spilled. Eventually a boom was deployed around the ship to contain the spilled fuel, but video showed that oil was getting past the boom, even in sheltered water. The actual oil spill response included volunteers and personnel in white Tyvek suits cleaning oil-stained rocks along the shorelines with paper towels.

In October 2016 the tug-barge Nathan E. Stewart ran aground while under tow, rupturing its containment and dumping more than 100,000 litres of diesel oil in Heiltsuk territory's waters.
Narwhal story (April 2017)
The Lingering Legacy of the Nathan E. Stewart Hakai Magazine (April 2017)
NTSB Report (November 2017)
The matter of response, oil recovery, remediation and compensation still have not been resolved (December 2025).
Frustrated with Canada’s spill response, Heiltsuk leaders take their fight international The Narwhal (March 2024)

Neither of these spills involved dilbit, which is expected to be harder to recover and remove as it is heavier than diesel and likely to sink with 1-2 days on water as the volatile diluent component boils off leaving the heavier asphalt-like material to sink with exposure time.

Concerns about response capability have been fuelled again recently (November 2025) with the near-sinking of an unidentified container barge near Bella Bella. The incident response system implememented since the Nathan E. Stewart incident doesn't seem to be satisfying the most directly affected parties - the coastal community closest to the near-sinking event.

No wonder Danielle Smith couldn't help herself from grinning from ear to ear while signing the MOU.

Oddly, the one positive takeaway I saw in this agreement for Canadians was 'Construction of thousands of megawatts of ... computing power, with a large portion dedicated to the sovereign cloud for Canda and its allies'. This measure of Canadian data sovereignty is a pressing issue, but it's unfortunate it has been tied to the dilbit pipeline albatross. It needs to addressed and funded as a priority project on its own, without strings attached.

An easy win that was missed is that those additional thousands of megawatts of electricity should have to come from green, renewable energy sources. Photovoltaics make electricity directly, as do wind turbines, and neither result in fuel bills for their entire operating life. Cheaper and faster to install than fossil fuel plants or nuclear fission. Backed up by energy storage, these clean energy sources can solve intermittency and provide reliable, continous, dispatchable power.

Further, there are things not called out in this MOU which do need attention.

Items for another day, but that need to be addressed:

Oil Spill Theatre Smithsonian Magazine (July 2016)

The oil industry in Canada still doesn't pay its bills despite continuing subsidies and making record profits

The oil and gas industry in Canada still doesn't clean up its depleted wells, leaving landowners like farmers with polluted land and no compensation to pay for the required cleanups.

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