When US President Barack Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper met Feb. 18 in Ottawa, they pledged to work together on economic recovery, international security, and clean energy.
Their announcement of a “clean energy dialogue” did not mention Alberta’s oil sands, which increasingly supply oil to the US and also have come under attack from environmentalists and some US congressional leaders.
Obama acknowledged the problem in a Feb. 17 interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. “What we know is that oil sands create a big carbon footprint,” he said, adding, “So the dilemma that Canada, the United States, China, and the entire world face is how we obtain the energy that we need to grow our economies in a way that is not rapidly accelerating climate change.”
No country will be able to solve the problem by itself, Obama said. “So Canada, the United States, China, India, the European Union, all of us are going to have to work together in an effective way to figure out how do we balance the imperatives of economic growth with very real concerns about the effect we’re having on our planet,” he said.
‘Clean energy mechanisms’
Obama said, “I think that it is possible for us to create a set of clean energy mechanisms that allow us to use things not just like oil sands, but also coal. The more that we can develop technologies that tap alternative sources of energy but also contain the environmental damage of fossil fuels, the better off we’re going to be.”
Harper also did not duck the issue when CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked him a question about it on Feb. 18: “The fact is that there are high emissions from oil sands extraction. We’re involved, as is the government of the United States, in funding technological development, looking at things like carbon capture and storage [CCS] as a way of minimizing or cutting down on some of those emissions.”
Weyburn example
His joint announcement with Obama specifically mentioned the two countries coordinating CCS demonstrations. It said this would build on their experience with pumping carbon dioxide from a North Dakota coal gasification plant for enhanced recovery operations at EnCana Corp.’s Weyburn oil field in Saskatchewan.
Harper said he expects CCS projects to be very important for the world from now on. Canada has been wrestling for the past 10 years with its desire to have a regulatory regime which would reduce its carbon emissions, he noted.
“But we’ve been trying to do so in an integrated economy when the United States has not been willing to do so. I think quite frankly the fact that we have a president [and] administration that want to see some kind of regulation on this is an encouragement. I’m convinced that our energy sector will respond,” Harper said.
