Oil Sands Alliance to Focus on Energy Industry Sustainability, Advancing Net Zero Ambitions | The Canadian News

Canada’s largest oil sands companies have formed a new advocacy group that they say will help advance the sustainable development and operation of their industry.

The Oil Sands Alliance was established on January 1 and is made up of oil sands producers Suncor Energy Inc., Cenovus Energy Inc., Imperial Energy Ltd., Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. and ConocoPhillips.

It is unclear if the new organization will be involved in political lobbying or exactly how it will be structured.

Al Reid, director of the Oil Sands Pathways to Net Zero alliance, which, along with existing groups such as the Oil Sands Community Alliance (OSCA), Canada’s Oil Sands Innovation Alliance (COSIA) and the Regional Oil Sands Operating Alliance, will be overseen by the new organization said that more details will be released soon.

However, he said all companies involved in the new Oil Sands Alliance will remain active members of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, the broader industry organization that is the country’s largest oil and gas lobby.

While CAPP will continue to have a broader oil and gas defense mandate for Canada’s oil and gas producers, the new Oil Sands Alliance will “lead the work related to tar sands.”

“As Canada’s largest petroleum resource, the oil sands have challenges and opportunities that are unique within the broader oil and natural gas industry,” Reid said in an emailed statement.

“We know this requires a level of focus and work that requires the specialized approach of our own industry group.”

Reid described the level of collaboration between oil sands producers at this time as “unprecedented”.

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Via Oil sands pathways to net zero initiative, announced last year by the same companies that make up the new Oil Sands Alliance (as well as MEG Energy Inc., which does not participate in the new group), the main players in the industry have publicly committed to working together to achieve the goal of zero net greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

The industry’s vision of reaching that goal is anchored in a proposed major carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) transportation line that would capture CO2 from oil sands facilities and transport it to a storage facility near Cold Lake, High.

CCUS is a technology that captures greenhouse gas emissions from industrial sources and stores them deep in the ground to prevent them from being released into the atmosphere.

Proponents say CCUS will need to be vastly expanded in the oil and gas industry if Canada is to have a chance of meeting its climate goals. The federal government has proposed a tax credit for CCUS projects, and tar sands producers have been in talks with Ottawa about the details of that credit.

In December, Cenovus CEO Alex Pourbaix said in a conference call with analysts and reporters that CCUS is not, at this point, a cheap technology on its own and that any large-scale adoption by the industry will require a “significant government support”.

In an interview Friday, Greenpeace Canada senior energy strategist Keith Stewart said it’s clear that the tar sands players have gone all-in on “net zero” and that the creation of the new advocacy group will likely have as aim to help promote that message and secure government support for carbon sequestration projects.

But Stewart said the problem with the term “net zero” is that companies are talking about reducing net emissions from their operations, not curbing their overall fossil fuel production.

“I don’t think anyone should be confused by this particular coat of green paint,” Stewart said of the newly formed industry group, “until they actually change their business plan to align with going off fossil fuels in the coming decades.”