Carney's Tar Sands Pipeline Plan Depends On "Carbon Capture"; Notes Show His Gov Knows Little Of Its Unreality

When Prime Minister Mark Carney announced last November he would support a massive new oil sands pipeline to the west coast, he presented the deal as a win for the climate alongside the economy. As part of the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) Carney signed with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, his government agreed to help support construction of a $16.5 billion project designed to capture carbon emissions from the oil sands industry and then bury those emissions underground.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology has a long track record of failed projects and missed targets worldwide and is considered a false climate solution by many experts and environmental advocates. But Carney claimed at the time that the CCS project, advanced by the oil industry group Pathways Alliance, would “drive down our emissions.” A federal government backgrounder on the agreement stated that the technology would assist in “making Alberta oil among the lowest carbon intensity-produced barrels of oil in the world.” The Carney government made this bold announcement about the climate potential of CCS while only having “very limited” data about how much the Pathways Alliance project would cost and whether it was technically feasible, according to Department of Finance briefing notes ahead of a September 2025 roundtable meeting in Edmonton that DeSmog obtained.

EDIT

The briefing notes stated that several executives set to attend the Edmonton meeting were members of the Pathways Alliance, which had launched in 2022 with a goal of achieving “net zero emissions by 2050” in Canada’s oil sands industry. Despite running national ad campaigns touting carbon capture and sending delegates to COP climate summits, Pathways seemed to have made very little actual progress over the years on moving its proposed CCS project forward.

By the time the Edmonton meeting happened last fall, Pathways hadn’t yet begun “detailed engineering and design” on the project or undertaken any preliminary work including “clearing of right-of-ways and pipeline construction and commissioning.” Yet in early November, the Carney government released its Budget 2025, which extended CCS tax credits by five years, now stretching from 2031 to 2035. “Updates will be provided in due course as work advances on the project,” the spokesperson wrote. Later in November, however, despite lacking basic information about how the project would be funded and engineered, the Carney government assured the country that carbon capture would result in “some of the lowest carbon-intensity oil produced in the world.”

EDIT

https://www.desmog.com/2026/02/20/carney-government-knew-carbon-capture-was-very-limited-docs-show/