Energy and Natural Resources - Op Eds

On Tuesday, Alberta’s United Conservative Party government announced the details of its carbon pricing plan for large emitters, the Technology Innovation and Emissions Reduction Regulation (TIER). At its core, TIER is a carbon tax, in the sense that it puts a price on emissions. While the large-emitter piece of carbon pricing receives far less attention than the notorious “carbon tax,” TIER will cover more than double the emissions.

It was highly anticipated, given the party’s rhetoric around climate change: The UCP’s seeming raison d’être was fighting the carbon tax espoused by the provincial NDP and the federal Liberals, and it wasn’t so long ago that Premier Jason Kenney mused openly about reviving coal power and vowed to…

Canadian governments are making good on a 2016 pledge to cut oil-and-gas-sector methane emissions by 40 to 45 per cent below 2012 levels by 2025.

Since the pledge, both Alberta and the federal government have issued rules on reducing leaks of methane, which is many times as potent a heat trapper as carbon dioxide, and both are slated to go into effect next year.

In recent weeks, however, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has proposed relaxing regulation of oil-and-gas-sector methane emissions, sparking debate about whether new tougher emissions rules will make Canada uncompetitive in attracting oil and gas investment.

Nevertheless, for our energy to retain market share globally, Canadian production…

If you surveyed 1,000 Canadians, as pollsters often do, and asked them to provide an example of an innovative sector, most would not name forestry. Yet, in an age of increased trade protectionism, worsening forest fires and concerns about environmental impact of materials from cement to plastic, Canada’s forest products industry is meeting these challenges head on.

Years of extensive collaboration with governments, Indigenous communities, and research partners has made Canada’s forest products sector a global leader in product and process innovation, environmental stewardship, and international trade. Yet as science transforms the materials of daily life and new markets enter the global middle class, the question before us is,…

Remember when some concerned energy analysts predicted there was an imminent limit to global oil supply? It’s now obvious there was no “peak oil” on the supply side; the world has hundreds of years of available oil supply. However, a peak in global oil demand is within sight and could be reached by the mid-2030s, if not sooner.

The supply-side analysis of peak oil was wrong-headed for two key reasons. First, it did not reflect the massive stocks of non-conventional oil, such as that embedded in porous rock and in Canada’s oil sands. Second, and more importantly, supply-side analysis severely underestimated the capacity of the oil industry to innovate and find ways to access these non-conventional sources of oil by developing new…

Earlier in July, Alberta’s government released its proposal for a new framework for output-based pricing of greenhouse gas emissions from large industrial emitters. The Technology Innovation and Emission Reduction (TIER) would replace the current Carbon Competitiveness Incentive Regulation (CCIR), introduced by the previous government in 2018.

The central difference is a move from a “one product, one benchmark” approach under CCIR for setting the thresholds above which facilities would face a carbon price and below which facilities would earn credits. In contrast with CCIR, for all sectors outside power generation, the TIER will move to a facility-specific benchmark equal to 90 per cent of a facility’s average emission intensity…