Residents who live near the proposed Pathways carbon storage project say they remain concerned about potential environmental impacts related to the project.
The project would use a 400-kilometre pipeline to transport carbon dioxide emissions from oilsands facilities near Fort McMurray to an underground storage facility near Cold Lake.
The agreement between the Alberta government, federal government and five major oil companies said six million tonnes of carbon dioxide would be captured annually by the mid-2030s and an additional 10 million tonnes by 2045.
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St. Paul County resident and No CO2 Pipelines Alberta Coalition co-founder, Amil Shapka called the July 2 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) “a real gut punch.”
“I don’t see anything in there for the taxpayer and the people who live here,” he said.
St. Paul County resident and coalition co-founder Penny Fox said they have spent the last two years researching the proposal and sharing information with neighbours and municipalities.
“They don’t think it’s going to be a problem. But nobody can give us a guarantee that it isn’t going to,” Fox said.
Fox said she attended an open house and an initial meeting, but has seen little community presence since then.
Paul Belanger, an ecological engineer and science adviser for Keepers of the Water, an Indigenous-led non-profit environmental group, said the scale of the proposed project is unprecedented.
Belanger said the risk of Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is just too high.
“We’re going totally the wrong direction,” Belanger said. “In my view, we’re shortening the lifespan of our civilization by these kinds of decisions.”
He added that there is not enough known about CCS.
Researchers who study CCS say the public’s questions are valid, but monitoring and risk management are part of the technology.
University of Alberta engineering Prof. Rick Chalaturnyk said concerns about groundwater are “exactly the risks that you worry about” when monitoring the CO2 to see how it behaves.
The CO2 will be brought to the Cold Lake region as the area meets the standards for safe storage, Chalaturnyk explained, adding that carbon capture is not a new technology.
“The challenge mostly for the kinds of things that we’re talking about today is that people want to do it at a very large scale,” Chalaturnyk said.
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Lisa Doig, interim CEO of Carbon Management Canada, said projects are designed to minimize risks through monitoring CO2 underground.
“There is always risk with every project, and as part of your project development, you look at minimizing risks,” she said.
The proposed storage reservoir would be more than a kilometre underground where unexpected changes could be identified, Doig explained.
Carbon Management Canada is always looking at new technologies to advance carbon capture management and protocols, Doig said.
University of Calgary engineering Prof. Nader Mahinpey said the Pathways project would be unique in its scale.
He said Canada’s experience with existing CCS projects provides valuable knowledge, but the success of the Pathways project will depend on “sound science and technology, transparent regulation, public trust and whether it delivers real, measurable emission reduction or not.”
Mahinpey said CCS is not the “silver bullet” to solving climate change but one solution.
In a statement to CBC, Alberta’s Environment and Protected Areas ministry said the project remains subject to the Alberta Energy Regulators (AER) review process before approvals are granted.
The Oil Sands Alliance said in a statement the project will store CO2 well below groundwater sources with monitoring systems subject to AER approval.
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“The proposed Pathways Project will have a multi-layered safety system based on decades of oil and gas technical experience and scientific research,” the statement read.
They added that they have been consulting with Indigenous people and communities since 2023.
Next steps include developing binding agreements with Canada, Alberta and Oil Sands Alliance members before Nov. 15, 2026.
