With an April 1 deadline looming, officials with both the federal and Alberta governments say they may need more time to reach agreement on the industrial carbon pricing plan at the heart of the memorandum of understanding (MOU) the two governments adopted last fall.

At an appearance in Calgary earlier this month, Energy and Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson admitted that negotiators might miss the deadline—not only on carbon pricing, but on what the Financial Post describes as a “laundry list of goals” from the MOU, including final details on methane emission targets and impact assessment rules, and a decision on the Pathways Alliance carbon capture and storage megaproject.

“Everyone understands what’s at stake,” Hodgson told an event hosted by the Post and Calgary Economic Development earlier this month. “We have every intention of hitting those deadlines,” and “the federal and the provincial governments are doing their best to make sure we don’t waste this opportunity.”

But in the end, he added, “you work your damnedest to get to the deadlines, and you see what it looks like when you get really close. And I’m not predicting anything, [but] if something slips, look how the other side behaves…

“If the other side says, ‘You know what, we’re working in good faith, we’re committed to this,’ we’re going to get this done. And I think that’s the spirit we’re in right now.”

Alberta’s minister of affordability and utilities, Nathan Neudorf, said another six weeks might be enough time for the two governments to show progress toward an agreement, but not a final deal.

“There’s more work to do, and there are some viewpoints that are incredibly far apart that we’re working toward. We’re trying to weld an agreement that is practical, as the minister said, real and affordable,” he said. “We have the same end goal. It’s the how, and how much is it going to cost.”

When Prime Minister Mark Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith signed the deeply controversial MOU Nov. 27, it called for a new industrial carbon pricing regime that would operate through the province’s Technology Innovation and Emissions Reduction (TIER) program and set a minimum effective carbon credit price of $130 per tonne. The two leaders presented that provision as a cornerstone of a plan that was meant to trigger 1.4 million barrels per day of new oil sands production and set the stage for “one or more private sector constructed and financed pipelines, with Indigenous peoples co-ownership and economic benefits”.

The carbon pricing target fell short of the current federal benchmark of $170 per tonne, but Smith’s spokesperson still began walking back the commitment within hours of the signing. Scarcely a week later, Alberta “introduced regulatory changes that will flood the province’s industrial carbon pricing market with credits and further weaken the carbon price signal for major emitters,” the Canadian Climate Institute’s Principal Economist Dave Sawyer said at the time.

Last week, Pembina Institute Executive Director Chris Severson-Baker released a list of four minimum expectations for successful negotiations around the MOU, including:

• A minimum industrial carbon price of $130 per tonne by 2030;

• Rules that require companies in Alberta to meet the same targets for methane reductions and clean electricity that apply in other parts of the country, to avoid creating “unfairness for industry elsewhere in Canada”;

• Agreement that industry will “immediately put money on the table” for the Pathways CCS project, particularly with taxpayers already “paying for two-thirds of it through very generous tax credits”;

• No taxpayer money for another pipeline. “Either an oil pipeline is a good business idea, or it’s not,” Severson-Baker wrote. “If it is a good idea, then the private sector should be happy to invest in it. If they won’t invest, then it’s a bad idea and taxpayers shouldn’t be asked to pay for it.”

Earlier this month, the CEO of Calgary-based pipeliner Enbridge Inc. announced the company won’t risk the “long timelines and shifting political landscape” that could derail a new West Coast pipeline, Bloomberg reports. “I don’t think investors or the infrastructure companies should be taking on all that risk of development in jurisdictions that have historically created challenges,” Gregory Ebel declared.