Bring us your carbon, world: N.L. launches challenge to fund carbon capture projects

As big carbon emitters struggle to come up with ways to meet net zero targets and fight climate change, the provincial government is dangling $6 million as an incentive to help establish offshore Newfoundland and Labradoras a global hub for carbon storage.

Premier Andrew Furey was joined by academic and oil and gas industry leaders Tuesday as he announced what's called the CCUS Innovation Challenge.

The government is inviting expressions of interest for financial support from businesses, organizations and researchers who are looking at ways to commercialize the process of carbon capture, storageand utilization CCUS for short of emissions from heavy industry, including oil and gas production.

It's a new frontier that has its share of critics, and is slowly making headway in places likes Alberta, Saskatchewan and the North Sea. ButFurey believes it could bethe latest step "towarddecarbonization and creating a greener future" for the province.

A big economic opportunity

The International Energy Agency estimates 14 per cent of global reductions in carbon dioxide must come from the CCUS process, and Furey believes the offshore industry could play a key role in reaching that target.

"A demand for these solutions has some economists estimating that this could be a multi-billion dollar industry in and of itself," Furey said.

Some $3 million is available to support research and development to help decarbonizeoil production that is currently taking place in the offshore sector. Projects such as Hibernia, Hebron, Terra Nova and White Rose account for 14 per cent of the province's overall emissions.

Another $3 million is available to explore the feasibility of establishing offshore Newfoundland and Labrador as a regional hub for storage of locally and externally produced carbon.

The funding can support up to 50 per cent of eligible project costs, for a maximum of four projects.

Proposals must be submitted jointly by industry and academic partners, and the lead applicants must be post-secondary institutions in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Oil and gas platforms in the offshore sector use natural gas to fuel their operations. In the short term, the idea is to capture the emissions from the platforms and store them in oil reservoirs that have been depleted.

Over the longer term, there's a belief that those reservoirs can be used to store carbon that's been captured in other parts of Canada and around the world, and transported offshore by ships or pipeline.

Furey said there's potential to store up to a gigatonof carbon beneath the seabed in places like the Jeanne d'Arc Basin.

"That represents a significant impact to the global environment and a huge impact to the economy here in Newfoundland and Labrador," he said.

The provincial government envisionscompanies paying to transport and store their carbon emissions as clean air regulations intensify the pressure on companies to transition to the green economy.One of the big questions is whether offshore carbon storage can be economical, and that's part of what the innovation challenge aims to answer.

"Can we store enough? We think yes. Will the CO2 stay in place? We think yes," said Lesley James, a professor of process engineering at Memorial University who has been studying CCUS.

James leads the Hibernia Research Group at Memorial University, which historically has studied ways to maximize extraction from the oil reservoirs. The lab at the Bruneau Centre is now shifting its focus to carbon capture and storage, and hopes to benefit from the new CCUS grant program.

She said there's plenty of work ahead to understand the potential of offshore carbon storage, but she added there's also big potential.

"The learning curve is fast for all of us," she said.

Those applying for an innovation grant have five months to get their proposals together, and then another two years to complete their work.

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