Despite the fanfare that greeted the opening of Saskatchewan’s carbon capture and storage (CCS) facility October 2, the Regina Leader-Post calculates the venture will cost taxpayers $1 billion over its 20-year operating life.
“It is a great relief that the technology in Saskatchewan’s $1.4-billion carbon capture and sequestration project actually works. Too bad the math for the project doesn’t work quite as well,” Mandryk writes. The facility cost about $1.4 billion to build and will incur about $800 million in operating costs, while generating an anticipated $1.2 billion in revenue.
Although CCS is widely seen as a cornerstone of a low-carbon future, newly-elected Alberta Premier Jim Prentice declared the technology “a science experiment” last July.
