Alberta is using soaring profits from its oil sands fields to fuel an environmental makeover that officials hope will offset emissions from one-third of its cars and spawn pollution-cutting transportation programs.
The western province, which holds one of the world's largest oil reserves, is pouring $2 billion into a fast-track program meant to identify and build the first large-scale carbon capture system in a region laced with underground ribbons of saline aquifers that some environmentalists say are a suitable storage vault for carbon dioxide.
The provincial government is also dedicating $2 billion to public transportation initiatives meant to replace cars with the likes of city-to-city light rail lines, hybrid buses and commuter trains that thrust passengers into outlying suburban areas.
"We're tackling both sides of the emissions challenge on behalf of Albertans and all Canadians," Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach said in a statement. "We're reducing the impact of industrial emissions with carbon capture and storage and investing in public transit to reduce the impact from our tailpipes."
The move comes as Alberta faces increasing criticism for its growing contribution to climate change. The region's vast oil sands reserves are being tapped at about 1 million barrels a day, requiring an energy-intensive process to separate the heavy crude from thick, oily sand. The process emits three times the amount of greenhouse gases traditional oil production emits.
Almost 30 megatons of carbon dioxide and other gases are emitted during the process each year, the equivalent of the emissions from more than 5 million cars. That accounts for 12 percent of Alberta's total emissions. And it's growing. By 2020, officials expect to be exporting 4 million barrels of heavy crude a day, most of which will go to the United States.
For those reasons, environmentalists said, the initiative fails to aggressively address the dangers of a warming world. The plan fails to factor in the booming growth in oil production, critics said.
It also falls short of scientists' calls to cut greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent from 1990 levels by 2050 to avert the most catastrophic climate events, they added. Instead, Alberta's plan would cut 2005 levels by 50 percent, according to Jeh Cutler, Northwestern energy campaigner for Sierra Club Canada.
"The major problem there is, between 1990 and 2005, greenhouse gas emissions increased 37.4 percent," he said. "So this is a pretty weak plan."
"It will not lead to the reductions we need," Cutler added. "It's insufficient."
The Sierra Club wants to impose a moratorium on new oil production, saying the oil sands represent the fastest-growing source of emissions in Canada.
The notion that the growth in Alberta's oil sector is paying for the environmentally friendly programs is not comforting to Mary Griffiths, a senior policy analyst with the Pembina Institute.
"We're very concerned," she said of the publicly funded plan. "It should not be in the form of handouts to industry."
Instead, the government should double its carbon tax on companies that fail to meet their emission levels from $15 a ton now to $30 a ton, Griffiths said.
Government officials said the plan will spark one of the largest coal capture and sequestration programs anywhere. It will focus on quickly implementing capture technology at coal-fired power plants and oil sands extraction sites to reduce emissions by 5 million tons a year.
Alberta is considered a prime candidate for storing carbon dioxide because of its geological makeup, which offers deep underground rock formations in which the gases can be kept perhaps for centuries. More than 7 million tons of CO2 has been injected into a depleted oil field in Saskatchewan since 2000.
Alberta's plan would eclipse that level, potentially sealing 5 million tons into the ground each year until 2015. That's the equivalent of taking 1 million cars off the road annually, according to the government.
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