Shell sold millions of carbon credits for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that never happened, allowing the company to turn a profit on its fledgling carbon capture and storage project, according to a new report by Greenpeace Canada.
Under an agreement with the Alberta government, Shell was awarded two tonnes’ worth of emissions reduction credits for each tonne of carbon it actually captured and stored underground at its Quest plant, near Edmonton.
This took place between 2015 and 2021 through a subsidy program for carbon, capture, utilisation and storage projects (CCUS), which are championed by the oil and gas sector as a way to cut its greenhouse gas emissions.
At the time, Quest was the only operational CCUS facility in Alberta. The subsidy program ended in 2022.
Edited, this is what carbon taxes were supposed to replace, because everyone wanted something “market-based” even though regulation worked well for addressing CFCs. Personally, I’m of the opinion that if companies are cheating on cap-and-trade and whinging about carbon pricing that we should just straight-up regulate them. No bribes, no incentives, just “stop polluting or we fine you at 110% of your global revenue.”
Such sales would not have been illegal, but amounted to a “hidden subsidy” within the program which undercut the effectiveness of industrial carbon pricing, says Keith Stewart, senior energy strategist at Greenpeace and the author of the report.
In response to the report, Shell Canada spokesperson Stephen Doolan said carbon capture technology is critical to achieving international climate targets.
Pierre-Olivier Pineau, a professor and researcher in energy policy at HEC Montreal, said the Greenpeace report illustrates “a key underlying problem” for carbon capture and storage, that “the economic environment isn’t yet there to make them sound business.”
Without a sufficiently high price, Pineau says CCUS projects will be cancelled because “they are not as profitable as dumping CO2 straight in the atmosphere” — unless, as in the case of Shell, they are heavily subsidized, he said.
The Pathways Alliance, a consortium of Canada’s largest oilsands companies, is still trying to move ahead with a $16.5-billion carbon capture pipeline project, but is seeking about two-thirds of that amount to be covered by subsidies.
A spokesperson for Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said “the oil and gas sector needs to move forward on achieving reductions in absolute emissions.”
The original article contains 911 words, the summary contains 191 words. Saved 79%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
one of my favorite fun facts, is that apparently a non insignificant number of “carbon credits” come from unsealed oil wells being sealed up. Which sounds good and all.
Until you realize that leaving oil wells unsealed is literally illegal and not to regulation standards what so ever. So you are literally paying for carbon credits, that remove carbon, that never should have been in the environment to begin with.
Well, if big companies can get carbon credits, why can’t I? Biking a few miles a day should yield me some, shouldn’t it? Because I’m not using a car? Sure, I breathe more, but it’s still less CO2 than by using a car.
Think bigger. You need to offset the carbon you’ll save by not burning hundreds of tons of garbage at the local landfill. Do you own the landfill? Hell no. Will you burn it? Not if they pay you not to.
Lets say that you’re married but you want to cheat on your wife. That’s not good, you don’t want to upset your wife and I don’t want you to upset your wife. So I’m gonna do you a favour, I’ll not cheat on my wife and sell you the credit! Now when you cheat on your wife it’s ok, because you have a credit that negates it! Zero sum, no harm!
And you know what, I wouldn’t want anyone to upset their wife so out of the goodness of my heart I will not cheat on my wife as much as I can so that I can sell the credits to other men, that way it’s ok if they cheat on their wives. They don’t have to worry about upsetting anyone and my good behaviour is rewarded with money!
And all I had to do was nothing, then sell the credit for it…
The carbon credit system is designed to make companies responsible for emissions to pay money to companies who are reducing emissions. It’s a financial incentive to produce less emissions AND on the other side, a financial incentive to invest in green tech.
Using your metaphor…if you stopped cheating on your wife you could avoid spending ten grand on wife cheating credits. That’s a financial incentive to stop cheating on your wife. So many people will stop cheating on their wives.
Meanwhile, people who were thinking about cheating on their wives could instead collect ten thousand bucks for being faithful. So…many of those people won’t cheat on their wives.
I get how it’s supposed to work but who is keeping track of how many times I was going to cheat but then did not? Who says I even have a wife? Who says I REALLY was going to burn all that coal but then decided not to? Giving credits for not doing a thing is just too easy to abuse.
You’re probably thinking of Cardassia, which I will also note has a judicial system where the state decides the defendant’s guilt in advance of the trial. In such a system, it’s typical that the rich & powerful simply aren’t prosecuted. So it’s the same system as ours, just with fewer steps :-(
Not Risa, the vacation planet, nor Cardassia, the snake boi planet. This is a one-off where everyone was a little disappointed because Wesley Crusher was both killed and brought back to life for trampling some flowers.
Maybe it wasn’t Risa. I could be getting it mixed up. Anyway the planet in the ep I named is the one where eveyone is hot and almost naked, Wesley breaks a greenhouse and they go to lethally inject him and Picard is like, “Hold on bro he’s a shit but if anyone is going to kill Wesley it’s going to be me.”
I may have taken some liberties with the story but that’s basically it.
Rant in a totally different direction. Carbon Capture Is Not Sustainable!
Unless you can capture 1 ton of carbon using less energy than is extracted by burning 1 ton of carbon, you can not capture carbon. Carbon capture will ONLY work if the energy you use to capture the carbon does not add more carbon to the atmosphere (nuclear, wind, solar) but having to run a supplementary power generation tech just to negate the effects of your primary tech is just stupid, fossil fuels no longer a viable option.
Carbon capture, carbon footprint, carbon offsetting - its all bullshit made up by the oil and gas industry to greenwash their public image while they continue to destroy our planet.
Agreed. Forestation can be a large contributor to reducing climate change, but any scheme that is offered by polluting companies should be viewed with extreme scepticism.
Yeah, not saying it wouldn’t help, but a lot of these schemes don’t have enough oversight to guarantee that the tree you paid for is effectively planted and cared for enough that it will survive.
Realistically we’ll need to do everything to tackle climate change: change away from fossil fuels, doing everything we can to sequester carbon (in a way that doesn’t generate more emissions), and probably also reduce consumption in general (degrowth).
A bunch of young trees don’t equate to old growth forests in any sense and it’s even worse if the species hasn’t evolved in in balance with that environment’s other species and conditions.
So it’s not even just that the tree needs to survive. On top of that we need to put time and resources into the right mix of regionally native trees which will thrive and integrate into their surroundings to properly reform ecosystems over numerous decades that we don’t even have.
Not by half. Look up the rate at which we emit carbon and the sequestering abilities of a forest. You would have to cover every square inch of land with bamboo to break even.
No, you can’t. There are trillions of trees on earth and the impact they have on carbon emissions is relatively minimal, planting a forest or even many forests isn’t going to cut it.
Not to mention that for trees to be an at all viable long term carbon capture method, you can’t ever cut those trees down. If we can’t leave the fucking Amazon alone, what makes you think we won’t chop up that artificial forest in 50 years?
This is the same issue with kelp. Kelp has a ton of uses, and is an even better carbon sink than trees are, but to be a carbon sink you have to forgo all of those other uses because you have to literally sink the kelp to the bottom of the ocean and leave it there, because actually using it for anything just rereleases the carbon.
Not practically. You’d have to be replacing the trees faster than you chop them down just to account for the energy(and thus carbon) used to chop them and process them. Then there’s the fact that decomposition will also release the carbon, so you HAVE to use the lumber for stuff that is intended to last at least as long the tree grew, or else that tree is still a net negative.
Molten salt reactors have this little problem that they’re digesting themselves. The salt is so aggressive that it eats through the reactor before the building costs amortise. Unless you are a time traveller capable of giving us the material science of 200 years into the future fusion is going to be here first.
And? Yep, non-radioactive fluoride salt can be somewhat managed with ludicrously expensive materials. The equation is rather different when you add thorium to the equation. Also note that nine years are nowhere near long enough.
There’s a reason we don’t see those kinds of reactors in the wild: They can’t realistically be built as production-scale power plants. If they did greedy bastards would long-since have invested in the tech and tried to monopolise electricity production with patents and undercutting the competition.
You do know that the blankeded reactor only have a 7 year run cycle?
Have you seen the costs of a traditional reactor? Ya know with a 9" thick vessel only made in Japan.
The ONLY reason we don’t have LFTR reactors is because at the time the US was in the middle of a nuclear arms race and you can’t build a bomb that can be hidden (gamma rays) using the decay chain from thorium.
And it would also risk the capitalistic model y’all love so much.
If they were able to get a MSR to run for 9 years in the 1960’s we could easily do it now. Stop being a Debbie Downer
The ONLY reason we don’t have LFTR reactors is because at the time the US
Because no other country would be interested in the tech, or capable of building it. “Muh US nukes killed thorium” is a completely America-brained take.
Germany researched Thorium (pebble bed, in particular), never bothered with molten salt because it was seen as not feasible. Japan dabbled with molten salt, projects failed due to lack of funding. Neither countries have any interest in building nukes. The Chinese currently are trying, which is because the Chinese are currently trying everything. The government throwing money at the issue doesn’t in any way imply commercial viability, push come to shove they’d do it for the published papers alone.
Debbie Downer
I’m sorry for using reality to accost your religious beliefs but they happen to be dumb.
Carbon capture is basically a form of energy storage. If it’s energy that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to capture, or if it’s more energy than we need for consumption at a given moment in time, then it makes sense to store it instead. I don’t know enough to say if these would apply in practice, but it’s plausible that it’s better to capture than to use the energy.
Unless you can capture 1 ton of carbon using less energy than is extracted by burning 1 ton of carbon, you can not capture carbon.
Is this not already the case that these processes are net negative in carbon released? How much does it currently cost, in energy, to capture carbon at these smokestacks?
We burn carbon based fuels because the reaction between carbon and oxygen releases energy that can be used to generate electricity. It would take EXACTLY as much energy to turn the released CO2 back into oil/coal/carbon except that this is not a perfect world, there are losses at every step. The only way to lower CO2 levels is to globally stop burning fossil fuels for heating and electrical loads (hydrocarbons are needed for a bunch of very specific chemical processes).
Um, nobody is talking about chemically converting the released carbon dioxide back into chemical compounds with stored chemical energy, like hydrocarbons and graphite. They’re talking about physically sequestering CO2, or binding the carbon into materials that aren’t combustible (like calcium carbonate).
Put another way: if I burned some hydrocarbons in a fireplace and put a balloon over the flue, I’d capture some carbon dioxide (and probably some water) in that balloon, and the carbon in that balloon would’ve cost me less energy to capture than was released in burning the hydrocarbons to begin with. So long as I could keep the balloon from leaking or deflating.
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Breaking news oil company that lies at every opportunity wasn’t held accountable and choose to lie for bottom line.
Market-based solutions for the win!
/s, obviously.
Edited, this is what carbon taxes were supposed to replace, because everyone wanted something “market-based” even though regulation worked well for addressing CFCs. Personally, I’m of the opinion that if companies are cheating on cap-and-trade and whinging about carbon pricing that we should just straight-up regulate them. No bribes, no incentives, just “stop polluting or we fine you at 110% of your global revenue.”
Stop subsidising profitable companies, they just use that money to slap us in the face. Stop corporate welfare!
Start corporate warfare!
Boeing is already there
Privatize the profits, socialize the risk. Seems to be the motto Canada likes to follow.
Shame we can’t appropriate CN Rail…
Why hide the subsidy, Alberta? We know who your daddy is.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Such sales would not have been illegal, but amounted to a “hidden subsidy” within the program which undercut the effectiveness of industrial carbon pricing, says Keith Stewart, senior energy strategist at Greenpeace and the author of the report.
In response to the report, Shell Canada spokesperson Stephen Doolan said carbon capture technology is critical to achieving international climate targets.
Pierre-Olivier Pineau, a professor and researcher in energy policy at HEC Montreal, said the Greenpeace report illustrates “a key underlying problem” for carbon capture and storage, that “the economic environment isn’t yet there to make them sound business.”
Without a sufficiently high price, Pineau says CCUS projects will be cancelled because “they are not as profitable as dumping CO2 straight in the atmosphere” — unless, as in the case of Shell, they are heavily subsidized, he said.
The Pathways Alliance, a consortium of Canada’s largest oilsands companies, is still trying to move ahead with a $16.5-billion carbon capture pipeline project, but is seeking about two-thirds of that amount to be covered by subsidies.
A spokesperson for Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said “the oil and gas sector needs to move forward on achieving reductions in absolute emissions.”
The original article contains 911 words, the summary contains 191 words. Saved 79%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This bullshit does nothing for Albertans.
one of my favorite fun facts, is that apparently a non insignificant number of “carbon credits” come from unsealed oil wells being sealed up. Which sounds good and all.
Until you realize that leaving oil wells unsealed is literally illegal and not to regulation standards what so ever. So you are literally paying for carbon credits, that remove carbon, that never should have been in the environment to begin with.
I love capitalism.
Well, if big companies can get carbon credits, why can’t I? Biking a few miles a day should yield me some, shouldn’t it? Because I’m not using a car? Sure, I breathe more, but it’s still less CO2 than by using a car.
Think bigger. You need to offset the carbon you’ll save by not burning hundreds of tons of garbage at the local landfill. Do you own the landfill? Hell no. Will you burn it? Not if they pay you not to.
Yeah, you can basically tokenize anything ad absurdum. This kind of highlights how carbon tokens are just a PR move and nothing else.
Howling
nothing is stopping you from selling your own carbon credits…
Lets say that you’re married but you want to cheat on your wife. That’s not good, you don’t want to upset your wife and I don’t want you to upset your wife. So I’m gonna do you a favour, I’ll not cheat on my wife and sell you the credit! Now when you cheat on your wife it’s ok, because you have a credit that negates it! Zero sum, no harm!
And you know what, I wouldn’t want anyone to upset their wife so out of the goodness of my heart I will not cheat on my wife as much as I can so that I can sell the credits to other men, that way it’s ok if they cheat on their wives. They don’t have to worry about upsetting anyone and my good behaviour is rewarded with money!
And all I had to do was nothing, then sell the credit for it…
The carbon credit system is designed to make companies responsible for emissions to pay money to companies who are reducing emissions. It’s a financial incentive to produce less emissions AND on the other side, a financial incentive to invest in green tech.
Using your metaphor…if you stopped cheating on your wife you could avoid spending ten grand on wife cheating credits. That’s a financial incentive to stop cheating on your wife. So many people will stop cheating on their wives. Meanwhile, people who were thinking about cheating on their wives could instead collect ten thousand bucks for being faithful. So…many of those people won’t cheat on their wives.
Get it now?
I would report having multiple wives to get more bucks.
I could have burned down the amazon forest but I didn’t, so give me monies <facepalm>
Yes ok, but the people spending 10k to cheat on their wives are oil executives with bottomless pockets
I get how it’s supposed to work but who is keeping track of how many times I was going to cheat but then did not? Who says I even have a wife? Who says I REALLY was going to burn all that coal but then decided not to? Giving credits for not doing a thing is just too easy to abuse.
Sometimes I wish we lived on Risa (Star Trek TNG S01E08), where the penalty for every crime is death.
Sure, a lot of innocent people would die, but at least there would be consequences for folks like these.
Yeah, it’s a dumb thought, but that’s how desperate I am to see anyone in power be held accountable for any-f-ing-thing.
You’re probably thinking of Cardassia, which I will also note has a judicial system where the state decides the defendant’s guilt in advance of the trial. In such a system, it’s typical that the rich & powerful simply aren’t prosecuted. So it’s the same system as ours, just with fewer steps :-(
Not Risa, the vacation planet, nor Cardassia, the snake boi planet. This is a one-off where everyone was a little disappointed because Wesley Crusher was both killed and brought back to life for trampling some flowers.
I thought Risa was the sex and vacation planet.
Maybe it wasn’t Risa. I could be getting it mixed up. Anyway the planet in the ep I named is the one where eveyone is hot and almost naked, Wesley breaks a greenhouse and they go to lethally inject him and Picard is like, “Hold on bro he’s a shit but if anyone is going to kill Wesley it’s going to be me.”
I may have taken some liberties with the story but that’s basically it.
I would like more of these paraphrased Startrek stories
I always thought the planet was Angel I, but it is actually Rubicun III in the episode “Justice”.
Sometimes I wish we lived there too.
Rant in a totally different direction. Carbon Capture Is Not Sustainable!
Unless you can capture 1 ton of carbon using less energy than is extracted by burning 1 ton of carbon, you can not capture carbon. Carbon capture will ONLY work if the energy you use to capture the carbon does not add more carbon to the atmosphere (nuclear, wind, solar) but having to run a supplementary power generation tech just to negate the effects of your primary tech is just stupid, fossil fuels no longer a viable option.
Carbon capture, carbon footprint, carbon offsetting - its all bullshit made up by the oil and gas industry to greenwash their public image while they continue to destroy our planet.
Pedantic, but you can do this by planting a forest (in a currently not forested area).
Most of those schemes are scams in one way or another as well tho.
Agreed. Forestation can be a large contributor to reducing climate change, but any scheme that is offered by polluting companies should be viewed with extreme scepticism.
Yeah, not saying it wouldn’t help, but a lot of these schemes don’t have enough oversight to guarantee that the tree you paid for is effectively planted and cared for enough that it will survive.
Realistically we’ll need to do everything to tackle climate change: change away from fossil fuels, doing everything we can to sequester carbon (in a way that doesn’t generate more emissions), and probably also reduce consumption in general (degrowth).
A bunch of young trees don’t equate to old growth forests in any sense and it’s even worse if the species hasn’t evolved in in balance with that environment’s other species and conditions.
So it’s not even just that the tree needs to survive. On top of that we need to put time and resources into the right mix of regionally native trees which will thrive and integrate into their surroundings to properly reform ecosystems over numerous decades that we don’t even have.
Not by half. Look up the rate at which we emit carbon and the sequestering abilities of a forest. You would have to cover every square inch of land with bamboo to break even.
No, you can’t. There are trillions of trees on earth and the impact they have on carbon emissions is relatively minimal, planting a forest or even many forests isn’t going to cut it.
Not to mention that for trees to be an at all viable long term carbon capture method, you can’t ever cut those trees down. If we can’t leave the fucking Amazon alone, what makes you think we won’t chop up that artificial forest in 50 years?
This is the same issue with kelp. Kelp has a ton of uses, and is an even better carbon sink than trees are, but to be a carbon sink you have to forgo all of those other uses because you have to literally sink the kelp to the bottom of the ocean and leave it there, because actually using it for anything just rereleases the carbon.
You can cut down the trees and they’ll still hold on to their carbon. Just don’t burn them.
Not practically. You’d have to be replacing the trees faster than you chop them down just to account for the energy(and thus carbon) used to chop them and process them. Then there’s the fact that decomposition will also release the carbon, so you HAVE to use the lumber for stuff that is intended to last at least as long the tree grew, or else that tree is still a net negative.
Not all cut timber is used for burning. Paper is still manufactured, along with strand board, particle board and plywood.
Molten Salt Reactors run at the perfect temp for CO2 sequestration. Should be building these things. Can do this while producing electricity
Molten salt reactors have this little problem that they’re digesting themselves. The salt is so aggressive that it eats through the reactor before the building costs amortise. Unless you are a time traveller capable of giving us the material science of 200 years into the future fusion is going to be here first.
ssr design is pretty based for this reason.
Who needs liquid fuel when you can just put the liquid fuel into a fuel rod anyway!
Bullshit
And? Yep, non-radioactive fluoride salt can be somewhat managed with ludicrously expensive materials. The equation is rather different when you add thorium to the equation. Also note that nine years are nowhere near long enough.
There’s a reason we don’t see those kinds of reactors in the wild: They can’t realistically be built as production-scale power plants. If they did greedy bastards would long-since have invested in the tech and tried to monopolise electricity production with patents and undercutting the competition.
You do know that the blankeded reactor only have a 7 year run cycle? Have you seen the costs of a traditional reactor? Ya know with a 9" thick vessel only made in Japan.
The ONLY reason we don’t have LFTR reactors is because at the time the US was in the middle of a nuclear arms race and you can’t build a bomb that can be hidden (gamma rays) using the decay chain from thorium.
And it would also risk the capitalistic model y’all love so much.
If they were able to get a MSR to run for 9 years in the 1960’s we could easily do it now. Stop being a Debbie Downer
Because no other country would be interested in the tech, or capable of building it. “Muh US nukes killed thorium” is a completely America-brained take.
Germany researched Thorium (pebble bed, in particular), never bothered with molten salt because it was seen as not feasible. Japan dabbled with molten salt, projects failed due to lack of funding. Neither countries have any interest in building nukes. The Chinese currently are trying, which is because the Chinese are currently trying everything. The government throwing money at the issue doesn’t in any way imply commercial viability, push come to shove they’d do it for the published papers alone.
I’m sorry for using reality to accost your religious beliefs but they happen to be dumb.
Even in this case carbon capture is stupid. Why not use that “green” energy to replace carbon-emitting power plants?
Carbon capture is basically a form of energy storage. If it’s energy that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to capture, or if it’s more energy than we need for consumption at a given moment in time, then it makes sense to store it instead. I don’t know enough to say if these would apply in practice, but it’s plausible that it’s better to capture than to use the energy.
Because Alberta thinks wind turbines and solar panels are ugly.
Is this not already the case that these processes are net negative in carbon released? How much does it currently cost, in energy, to capture carbon at these smokestacks?
TL;DR it’s not possible.
We burn carbon based fuels because the reaction between carbon and oxygen releases energy that can be used to generate electricity. It would take EXACTLY as much energy to turn the released CO2 back into oil/coal/carbon except that this is not a perfect world, there are losses at every step. The only way to lower CO2 levels is to globally stop burning fossil fuels for heating and electrical loads (hydrocarbons are needed for a bunch of very specific chemical processes).
Um, nobody is talking about chemically converting the released carbon dioxide back into chemical compounds with stored chemical energy, like hydrocarbons and graphite. They’re talking about physically sequestering CO2, or binding the carbon into materials that aren’t combustible (like calcium carbonate).
Put another way: if I burned some hydrocarbons in a fireplace and put a balloon over the flue, I’d capture some carbon dioxide (and probably some water) in that balloon, and the carbon in that balloon would’ve cost me less energy to capture than was released in burning the hydrocarbons to begin with. So long as I could keep the balloon from leaking or deflating.
And even then it will on average still create emissions because it takes capacity from the grid.
No way!