Canada's CO₂ Capture and Storage TRM 
Foreword

Climate change, caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, is a century-scale and global issue. It represents clear risks characterized by significant uncertainties about both the costs and benefits of mitigation. It also, however, represents significant opportunities to develop new energy technologies and to secure additional value from Canada's resources by capturing, transporting and using carbon dioxide for enhanced oil and gas recovery as an initial phase of carbon dioxide capture and geological storage. Capture and storage holds an important position in the portfolio of options to reduce emissions, which include energy conservation, energy efficiency, and fuel switching, because it directly deals with emissions from fossil fuels and can deliver large greenhouse gas reductions starting in the near-term.

The magnitude of the problem cannot be underestimated, considering historic trends — while the efficiency in electrical appliances, light bulbs, turbines and other industrial instruments has increased by 30 to 50 percent in the past three decades, the use of energy has more than doubled. This is due to the dramatic increase in the use of electrical power which fuels our electronic age. We also need to consider the increase in world population (which is estimated to grow to 9.8 billion by the middle of this century), the gap between industrial and developing economies, and the fact that some 40 percent of the world's people currently have no access to modern energy. This added to the world's average real economic growth, estimated to be 2 to 3 percent per year for the next 50 years, suggests that conservation and efficiency gains will be overwhelmed by growth in energy use.

The above suggests that the world will need all the supply of energy it can access and indeed all projected trends indicate increased usage of fossil fuels in the 21^st century. The hope for a low emissions hydrogen economy to replace today's fossil fuel based economy, remains far down the road. As a result, any efforts to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere should be seen as a long-term effort to slow the current emissions trend before ultimately reversing it.

An option to reduce the carbon intensity of the fossil fuel energy supply today is to capture the carbon dioxide, transport it, and store it in geological formations. This Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage Technology Roadmap (CCSTRM) seeks to establish a robust architecture for addressing the technical risks and economic costs, with scientific understanding of geological, geotechnical, reservoir management and engineering aspects of capture and storage. In this way, a range of possible solutions is being developed to guide policy decisions and the domestic approach to be taken as part of international collaborative efforts. This roadmap must be seen as a critical first step to make Canada more competitive, as Canada is a major and growing exporter of energy resources.

The success of this roadmap, in helping frame the discussion of capture and storage to help achieve greenhouse gas reductions in Canada, requires industry-government collaboration to address the innovation gap and develop risk sharing mechanisms to reduce the risks inherent to the costly deployment of infrastructure and systems. In this regard, implementing the objectives of this CCSTRM would help accelerate collaboration, and align funders, researchers, industry, and governments, to ultimately achieve the vision embodied in this roadmap.

Dr. Eddy Isaacs, 
Managing Director, 
Alberta Energy Research Institute