A dead bird lies on the soil on a Weyburn, Sask. farm
A Saskatchewan farm couple whose land lies over the world's largest carbon capture and storage [CCS] project says greenhouse gases that were supposed to have been injected permanently underground are leaking out, killing animals and sending groundwater foaming to the surface. It's a story with global implications, potentially bad ones, for the energy sector. Governments around the world, along with multinational corporate partners in the fossil fuel industry, are spending billions of dollars to research and develop methods to capture carbon dioxide emissions and storing the CO2 in deep underground wells. The carbon capture and storage project in Weyburn, Saskatchewan, has been cited as a world-leading example and Harper's Tories have bet $2 billion taxpayer dollars on CCS. This failure of their pet CCS project should have the Tories and their oily industry buddies worried.
The fossil fuel industry has one goal, shareholder profits. Governments around the world should have different criteria. This Weyburn project, as with thousands of others globally, was designed to increase the flow of oil whose production was rapidly diminishing. It was never designed as a CCS facility, it doesn't have even the basic impermeable caprock required by geologists. But when the government shovels money in the oily boys have visions of sugar dancing in their heads.
One day perhaps we clever primates will figure out how to dig our way out of the hole we're in, but right now our only choice is to be real conservatives, to conserve, to want less.
