Monday, February 9, 2009

Oil recovery to be taxpayer subsidized?

Back when environmentalists were raising the alarm about a coming ice age and anti-war activists had us fearing a nuclear winter, chemical engineers like my father were engaged in "carbon capture and storage" profitably, for the oil industry.

My father worked for a large oil company at the time known as Dresser Industries. Dresser's operations based in Edmonton, like many other oil servicing companies of the time was engaged in an enhanced oil recovery technology pioneered by Royal Dutch Shell in 1972 then called "CO2 injection." Today the industry prefers to call CO2 injection "carbon capture and storage (CCS)."

Now that Alberta's provincial government is planning on making CCS a showcase of its Climate Change Strategy, should we expect the 2 billion dollars the Alberta Government is planning on spending to create the infrastructure to pump CO2 to oil fields will come from any additional revenues Albertans anticipated from our new oil royalty regime?

Though I am tempted to address the tenuous foundation of anthropogenic global warming, I ask environmentalists why the government is willing to pay for the collection and distribution of CO2, a raw material the oil industry paid for since 1972, so that same industry can extract more combustible hydrocarbons generating more CO2? With "climate change" initiatives like this one, it is no wonder multinational corporations like BP are on board.