Kenneth Green is a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute.At a recent media briefing in Fort McMurray with Premier Danielle Smith, Prime Minister Mark Carney added the West Coast pipeline to Canada’s priority list of major projects to purportedly fast-track the approval process for the project.The pipeline would run from the Bruderheim area northeast of Edmonton to a deep-water terminal on British Columbia’s southwest coast, mainly following the existing Trans Mountain corridor, with a planned capacity of one million barrels per day of heavy crude. According to the Alberta government, the pipeline and coastal loading facility will cost between $35.2 billion and $43.7 billion.Crucially, this also moves the associated “Pathways” — a massive planned project to capture the carbon dioxide produced in oil sands production and processing and transport it to a storage site deep underground in Cold Lake, Alberta — along for the ride.But clearly, neither the physical feasibility nor the environmental, health, and safety ramifications of the Pathways project are well understood.First, is it feasible? While capturing, liquefying, and reinjecting carbon dioxide generated by oil production — to further enhance oil field production — has a long history, the idea of capturing it and burying it without using it to generate additional oil production (and profits) has only seen a limited number of pilot projects with mixed track records around the world. .In fact, most of those carbon-capture projects underperformed at capturing and storing carbon dioxide emissions while costing significantly more than expected. A study published in 2024, which examined the track record of 16 carbon-capture projects, found that the most effective carbon-capture facilities examined captured only 78% of the amount of carbon the industry claimed the technology would capture. The average capture rate was only 47.6%.Second, what about the environmental, health, and safety effects? In my latest study published this year, we surveyed the literature and found that carbon capture, utilization, and storage at scale may pose significant threats, including stimulating increased seismic activity around carbon injection and storage sites, groundwater and surface water contamination risks, soil contamination risks, and even potential leakage of carbon dioxide at concentrations hazardous to animal or human health. The most prominent risk is increased seismic activity. At one CO₂ storage project in central Algeria, for example, thousands of small seismic events were recorded, with their occurrence closely following changes in CO₂ injection rates. Similar behaviour was observed at the Hontomín pilot site in Spain, where small seismic events occurred during periods of higher injection pressure and longer injection tests. The Carney government’s advancement of the West Coast pipeline to Canada’s major projects list is no doubt a welcome development for anyone who wants additional Canadian oil production and export to non-US markets. But going along for the ride is a new, lightly tested idea of capturing and storing massive amounts of CO₂. In light of the preliminary study of global experience with large-scale carbon capture and storage, we should keep a wary eye on the Pathways project tied to the West Coast pipeline.Kenneth Green is a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute.
