Media Contact: Amy Taylor

Amy Taylor, Director of Alberta Energy Solutions with the Pembina Institute, made the following statement in response to the announcement that the governments of Alberta and Canada will provide an $865 million subsidy to Shell’s Quest Carbon Capture & Storage (CCS) project, covering 65 per cent of the total cost:

“This is a very significant subsidy for one of the world’s largest and most profitable oil companies, and the government needs to take steps to ensure that polluters soon start shouldering the full cost of CCS deployment.

“Canada urgently needs regulations that put a price on pollution high enough to compel polluters to invest their own money in the deployment of technologies like CCS. This will be a key test for the federal announcement on cap-and-trade expected in the coming weeks.

“In parallel to its support for CCS, the government needs to support a massive scale-up in renewable energy and energy efficiency, the most sustainable solutions to climate change. Unfortunately the federal government has ceased support for renewable energy development in Canada, failing to renew the ecoENERGY for Renewable Power program in the last budget. In sharp contrast, President Obama’s recovery and reinvestment package included $27 billion of support for renewable energy, almost 14 times more per person than Canada’s economic stimulus package.

“If Canada remains singularly focused on ‘end of pipe’ solutions like CCS for the fossil fuel sector while largely ignoring renewable energy and energy efficiency, we will be poorly positioned to compete in the clean energy economy.”

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The Pembina Institute is a non-partisan sustainable energy think tank. The Pembina Institute’s perspective on carbon capture and storage is available at http://www.pembina.org/pub/1787.

For more information, contact:

Amy Taylor, Director of Alberta Energy Solutions
The Pembina Institute
Cell: 403-996-0510
Email: amyt@pembina.org