If these projects were fully used, they could destroy Canada’s climate goals
In a rock formation called the Montney Play, which is just below the surface of B.C. and Alberta, there are enough potential greenhouse gasses to blow past Canada’s 2030 emissions targets 30 times over.
It’s one of 12 fossil fuel deposits scientists have found.in the journal Energy PolicyIn Canada, scientists have found places that, if their resources were taken and burned, would each release a billion tonnes or more of carbon into the air. These places are called “carbon bombs.” The authors say that this would be a disaster for the world’s efforts to stop temperatures from rising.
But development in the Montney is going to pick up in the next few years. Since the natural gas industry gets help from the government, many of these projects are expected to make important economic contributions.
- Read “Sitting on a Carbon Bomb,” a special feature about the First Nation that is now in charge of new development in the Montney.
Kjell Kühne, the lead researcher on the paper and the director of Leave it in the Ground, an effort to stop the extraction of fossil fuels, says Canada needs to find a way to stop these projects or risk making climate-related disasters worse.
“If you want to make money, you’re betting that people will keep burning down the house at the same rate,” he said. “That’s a very risky bet.”
A different approac
Kühne and others found 425 “carbon bombs” around the world. Together, they would blow the carbon budget needed to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 C.
Researchers measured how much carbon dioxide would be released if each country took out and burned its biggest reserves of fossil fuels.
Thinking of these projects as “carbon bombs” includes the emissions that come from actually burning the fuel. This is a better way to measure the impact on the climate than the way the Canadian government counts emissions, said Julia Levin, associate director of Environmental Defense, who was not involved in the research.
Only the carbon dioxide that comes from Canada is counted by the Canadian government. It doesn’t count the greenhouse gasses that are made when these fossil fuels are shipped to another country and burned there.
“It lets big oil and gas producers like Canada get out of climate responsibility for the oil and gas they take out of the ground,” said Levin.
She said that Canada needs to stop making oil by 2034 to stop a catastrophic rise in global temperatures.
“The science is unequivocal.”
The Montney Pla
The Montney Play is Canada’s biggest carbon bomb and the sixth biggest in the world.
Fracking, a process that uses a lot of water and lets methane leak into the air, is used to get the natural gas, which is mostly made up of methane.
When it’s in the air, methane holds on to 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide. It’s also responsible for about30 per centThe International Energy Agency says that since the industrial revolution, the world’s temperature has gone up by.
Carbon dioxide stays in the air for hundreds of years. Methane, on the other hand, only stays in the air for about 12 years. This means that stopping the release of methane could be a quick way to keep temperatures down in the near future.
“Right now, half a degree of warming is due to methane,” Kühne said. “In the middle of a climate emergency, fracking is one of the worst things you can do.”
Since the end of a B.C. Supreme Court case in 2021 between the Government of B.C. and Blueberry River First Nations, whose traditional territory covers a large part of the formation, no new developments have been allowed in the heart of the Montney. A judge said that the effects of resource development as a whole are too big to ignore.Breached their rights under Treaty 8.
After the First Nation and the province came to an agreement earlier this year, the First Nation now has more say over what happens on their land.
That doesn’t mean that natural gas won’t be taken out of the area. In some places, companies can’t build new well pads, but they can still drill new wells on sites where they already are. Allan Chapman’s research in the Journal of Geoscience and Environment Protection says that the Montney pads that are already there are only being used about a quarter of the time.
Natural gas is a big part of what keeps the economy going in northeastern British Columbia. It supports thousands of jobs and brings in a lot of money for the province.
This is why Dan Davies, MLA for Peace River North and a member of the opposition B.C. Liberal Party, says it’s important for the industry to keep going and even grow, because people still need it.
He said that natural gas is used to heat homes in the area during the cold winters.
“The oil and gas industry is really the heart of northeastern B.C.,” he said, adding that royalties from oil and gas pay for important public services like schools and hospitals.
Davies says that Canada’s natural gas can be good for the environment if it helps countries like India and China stop using coal. Natural gas does have lower emissions than coal, but the IEA says that switching from one fossil fuel to another won’t cut emissions enough to keep the temperature from rising by more than 1.5 C.
Two of Canada’s other carbon bombs are natural gas formations, five are in the oil sands of Alberta, and three are metallurgical coal mines, which means the coal is used to make steel instead of electricity.
The Liard Basin, one of the two remaining gas formations, stopped getting gas in 2021, according to theB.C. Energy Regulator.
Two of the three coal mines have not even started taking coal out yet.
At least two of the projects are backed by Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. of Calgary. The Montney Play is one of these projects. CBC News asked the company for an interview several times, but they didn’t answer.
‘A climate clown
Levin and Kühne both agree that Canada needs to stop these projects if it wants to meet its climate goals.
But the federal and provincial governments don’t stop them. Instead, they give them money.
During the 2021-22 fiscal year, the governments of Alberta and British Columbia gave more than $1 billion to fossil fuel companies in the form of subsidies.a reportBy the Institute for Sustainable Development International.
Keean Nembhard, a spokesperson for Natural Resources Canada, told CBC News that the federal government is planning to end subsidies for “inefficient” fossil fuels this year.
Nembhard said that there is no internationally agreed-upon list of inefficient subsidies, but that the federal Department of Finance and Environment and Climate Change Canada are working on a tool to figure out what this means in a Canadian context.
“So far, Canada’s efforts to get rid of inefficient fossil fuel subsidies have led to the elimination or simplification of nine tax measures that helped the fossil fuel industry,” he said in a statement.
But Levin says that the word “inefficient” doesn’t mean much in this situation.
“There is no word for inefficient,” she said. “The word was used as a loophole to let the G20 countries do whatever they wanted.”
Kühne says that the world needs to stop giving money to projects that use fossil fuels if it wants to stop global temperatures from going up.
“Canada is more of a climate clown than a climate leader,” Kühne said. “It has the most pollution per person in the world and helps the fossil fuel industry by giving them money.”