What Risk? What Reward?
SaskPower opened its $1.5 billion Boundary Dam Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) Facility to much fanfare, with Premier Brad Wall hailing the project as “another Saskatchewan first.” However, a new report from the Saskatchewan Office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives questions whether the rewards from such an investment outweigh the risks. SaskPower’s Carbon Capture Project: What Risk? What Reward?, by Brian Banks and Mark Bigland-Pritchard raises many questions about the cost of the project, the consequences for ratepayers, the purported environmental benefits and whether it was ultimately money well spent by the province. The authors conclude that the massive investment in CCS technology would have been much better spent on new, less-expensive, renewable sources of energy that would have a far greater environmental impact in terms of reduced Green House Gases (GHG) than what CCS technology can currently offer.
