Right now, we have a label that Canada has dirty oil. We want to completely erase that label. Rhona DelFrari, Sustainability officer at Cenovus Energy
For decades Exxon and other fossil fuel conglomerates knew much more than that climate change was real and would collapse Earth's biosphere. The company also knew that developing an industry that could capture greenhouse gases and bury them below the ground would not work to address the scale of the problem and was not economically feasible.
In 1981, when an in-house oil and climate expert warned the oil conglomerate that tapping the Natuna gas field off Indonesia had 71% CO2 content making the extraction difficult and expensive and likely changing the climate of the Earth. The Indonesian government ended the Exxon contract held since 1980 in 2007. Despite this, Exxon continued to greenwash and deny the dangers that would unleash with the immense project development. The gasfield is only now beginning to be developed.
Today, a recent revelation found that in 1991 Exxon discovered that the storage and capture of CO2 would never be economical and lead only to "relatively minor" reductions in the dangerous greenhouse gas from the atmosphere. That finding was a result of the mining that began in 1990 by Exxon in the Canadian province of Alberta.
In western Canada, where oil was buried since immemorial, lies what is known today as the Alberta Tar Sands. The oil is bitumen, a viscous liquid of hydrocarbons used for roofing and road surfacing. The sands seemingly go on forever; they are the size of England or Florida and one of the most significant industrial projects on the planet.
The extraction process is brutal; the tar is heavy, and extraction requires massive amounts of water, rivaling that a small city uses daily. Refining the carbon-rich oil to fill a gas tank requires even more energy and water. Two million acres of boreal forest have been lost since 2020 due to tar sands extraction creating biodiversity loss and a critical loss of a natural carbon sink. The scar of the development includes polluted rivers, chemical runoff channels, and massive lakes of toxic chemicals. The air smells of burning tires that damage the lungs. The diary cover photo (h/t Meteor Blades) illustrates the dystopia clearly. H/T to Greenpeace for the facts about the damage to the environment.
Investigative journalist Geoff Dembicki writes in The Tyee.
More than three decades ago, the Exxon-owned oilsands producer undertook one of Canada’s first major studies of “underground carbon dioxide disposal.” The company’s findings, which were published in a newly reviewed 1991 Imperial Oil research paper, were not encouraging. The technology requires massive expenditures, would only mitigate a small fraction of Canada’s carbon output and comes with “large net costs to society,” Imperial concluded.
Imperial’s early negative assessments of the technology proved prescient. “The problems that they identified back then are the same ones we’re talking about now,” Keith Stewart, a senior energy strategist with Greenpeace Canada, told The Tyee.
Imperial 0il is Exxon's subsidiary and is a top tar sands producer.
Imperial Oil responded to a media request about its 1991 paper by pointing The Tyee towards a climate solutions report that it published in May 2022.
This more recent report touts carbon capture and storage as “a proven method to collect and safely store CO2 emissions permanently underground. Imperial views CCS as a critical technology to be utilized in our net-zero oilsands goal and is collaborating with government and other third parties to accelerate its deployment in the field.”
But Imperial acknowledges that current carbon capture plants operating worldwide are only burying about 40 million tonnes of carbon emissions per year, an amount eclipsed each year by the emissions released from Canada’s oilsands industry alone.
And in a “cautionary statement” at the end of the report, Imperial Oil warns readers of the report not to take its bold language about carbon capture too seriously. “The reference to any scenario, including any potential net-zero scenario, does not imply Imperial views any particular scenario as likely to occur,” the report reads.
After more than 30 years of studying carbon capture, the oilsands producer was still unsure if the business case for the technology actually makes sense.
“The push for carbon capture is a way to distract us from the real solutions to climate change,” Stewart said, which include phasing out society’s use of oil and gas entirely.
Imperial oil directs media to a May 2022 report they prepared where they outright lie yet again, stating "a proven method to collect and safely store CO2 emissions permanently underground. Imperial views CCS as a critical technology in our net-zero oilsands goal and collaborates with government and other third parties to accelerate its deployment in the field."
Decades have passed. Yet the oil industry and its sympathizers continue to push the very same lies that the tar sands carbon would be captured with this technology. Add this to Net Zero and the year 2021 as stunning distractions and disinformation to convince the world that there is no threat from their toxic products. Think about that.