One should always be wary of arguing with engineers. Having enough engineers and skilled technicians in our extended family to launch a medium-sized firm, the journalist is often regarded during bull sessions at family reunions with polite attention (we do, after all, book the venue and buy the groceries) in the time just preceding a correction of viewpoint.
Particularly on matters concerning the energy industry, which is the natural nesting ground of the Western Canadian engineer.
The topic at hand was electricity and (from a certain point of view) the pointlessness of large tax subsidies for certain green energy projects.
From an engineering standpoint, nothing good can be accomplished in making our economy poorer by attempting to lower our carbon footprint via high-cost, subsidized green power.
As is borne out by recent headlines, even if the entire world were to cut its carbon footprint to zero immediately, climate models (created by engineers) show that global warming cannot be avoided. With massive, immediate inputs of money, and massive immediate global cuts in everyone’s standard of living, we might be able to ameliorate the effects of global warming in the next 50 years or so. A little. Maybe.
Because it’s obvious that very few people in industrialized economies would accept that great a sacrifice, the engineering viewpoint seems to be asking the rest of us to please stop doing useless things, so that we can do useful things instead. And to please stop taking the tax dollars of honest, hardworking engineers for projects that manifestly cannot accomplish their intended goals. (It is hard to affect in writing the smugly exasperated tone of our family’s engineers when explaining that to the journalist.)
The chief determiner of Alberta’s electrical future is price. The price of power has risen nationally about 10 per cent in the past year, and nobody is going to argue in Alberta that our power is cheaper than anyone else’s.
Alberta has coal reserves to last generations at current rates of use. Tonne for tonne, there is more energy in coal than in any other fossil fuel, and per unit of power, it is cheaper to produce than all the rest.
Natural gas could possibly supplant coal as a source of fuel to create electricity but not at today’s price. Alberta has vast reserves natural gas in deep, tight formations — more than was in the shallow formations we’ve developed so far. But it’s not economic to produce at today’s price, so there it will sit.
If and when the price rises, we will produce it — and somebody will get abundantly wealthy — but then coal’s cost advantage for electricity will apply.
The trick to satisfy both camps in our family debate is to develop coal for electricity and find an inexpensive way to remove the carbon dioxide from the flue gases. Then, we just pipe than CO2 back deep underground, forever. That sounds like a good job for engineers.
But the engineers know nothing is forever. On Tuesday in Saskatchewan, it was reported that a CO2 storage project is leaking. Gas is bubbling out of the ground in an old gravel bed and has so far been thought to have killed some wildlife, since CO2 is heavier than air and hugs the ground like an invisible lake.
But no matter how passionate these discussions get late into the night, nobody questions one thing: the unwillingness of the modern consumer to voluntarily consume less.
Overall consumption of electricity, gasoline or plastics never consistently declines, no matter how high the price — in the pocketbook or for the planet.
That’s a trick neither social engineers — nor real ones — has ever been able to perform.
Greg Neiman is an Advocate editor.