Canada must look beyond carbon burial: CAPP

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Canada should look beyond an emerging technology of burying greenhouse gases underground if it wants to help tackle climate change, the head of the country's main petroleum industry group said.

"Carbon capture and sequestration is important, but it is only one of a number of things that have to be approached," Pierre Alvarez, president of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, told the Reuters Global Energy Summit via a conference call from Calgary.

The government of Alberta, which is the center of Canada's petroleum industry, said early this year it hoped carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) would make up 70 percent of its emissions reduction goal by 2050.

That has led to criticism that the province may be putting too much faith in a technology which is not yet proved on a wide scale to slow global warming.

In addition, Alberta does not allow international trade in greenhouse gas offsets, which has emerged in the European Union's Emissions Trading Scheme as a way to expand the pool of emissions reductions through investment in developing countries in clean projects such as solar and wind power.

It prefers to keep emissions reduction efforts within its provincial borders, where industrial emitters pay into a technology development fund for releasing more than their quotas into the atmosphere.

Alvarez said Canada should also look at other options such as nuclear and geothermal power.

He stopped short of calling for a revision of Alberta's 70 percent CCS goal.

"Parts of CCS we know," he said, pointing to a few projects that capture carbon at industrial plants and a few that inject the gas into aging oil and gas fields. He conceded there are still challenges, particularly with storage of carbon in deep saline aquifers. CCS backers say saline formations have additional capacity to store the enormous volumes of CO2 that would need to be socked away to slow climate change.

With oil prices well above $100 a barrel, Alberta is hoping to become a bigger exporter of crude to the United States, the world's largest oil consumer, through production of its tarry oil sands. The resource is abundant, but it is energy- and emissions-intensive to produce.

(For summit blog: summitnotebook.reuters.com/)

(Reporting by Timothy Gardner, editing by Phil Berlowitz)