Alberta is on track to become the first place in North America to control and reduce virtually all air emissions from power plants – including toxic mercury and carbon dioxide gas blamed for global warming.
A Clean Air Strategic Alliance (CASA) team has almost finished a comprehensive, long-range plan to manage multiple emissions from Alberta’s electricity- generation sector, say team members.
CASA’s electricity project team includes senior provincial government officials, industry leaders and representatives of the environmental community. Not only would the plan be the first of its kind on the continent, it would be a template for the Alberta government to use in negotiating greenhouse gas reductions with other industry sectors in the province.
“As far as I know, it would be the most comprehensive framework anywhere,” says David Spink, Alberta Environment’s director of special projects and government’s co-chair of CASA’s project team.
“It would deal with greenhouse gases. It would deal with mercury, which nobody has done yet,” he told Business Edge.
CASA recommends policy on air- quality issues to the province based on achieving a consensus among all stakeholders.
Spink said a plan that everyone can sign off on is about 98 per cent complete.
The project team will present the plan and its recommendations to CASA’s high-level board at a special meeting scheduled for October 29.
If the board approves the package, Alberta Environment Minister Lorne Taylor would then take it to provincial cabinet.
“Once we have government endorsement, then it’s government policy and we start to implement the recommendations,” Spink said. “I’m pretty enthusiastic. I think we’re leading the way.”
The electricity industry’s co-chair on the CASA team is TransAlta Corp.’s Mike Kelly. Business Edge was unable to reach Kelly.
Bob Page, TransAlta’s vice-president of sustainable development, agreed that the CASA team is close to a deal. “I’m hoping by the end of October we’ll have a complete plan to be brought forward to the CASA board,” Page said.
CASA’s team includes Rocky Mountain House veterinarian Martha Kostuch and the Pembina Institute for Appropriate Development.
“We’re still trying to negotiate some of the very contentious issues,” Kostuch said. “I’m optimistic and hopeful that we’ll reach agreement on all of the issues.”
The project – the largest CASA has undertaken – has been complex and negotiations have been tough, Kostuch said.
“There’s no question that if we do succeed, Alberta will be a leader in Canada, if not in North America, as far as the control of these pollutants,” she said.
Details of the plan are subject to last-minute negotiations. But Spink said that it will allow electricity generators to trade in emissions of polluting nitrogen oxides and sulphur oxides. Companies that reduce their NOX and SOX emissions by more than the required levels would receive credits that they could sell to other firms.
NOX and SOX trading has been used for several years in the U.S., where it has successfully cut emissions faster and to lower levels than those required under regulations.
CASA team members expect that Alberta’s plan will reduce NOX and SOX emissions from power plants in the province by at least 50 per cent by 2020.
Alberta electricity producers will also be able to trade in carbon dioxide emissions, to spur reductions of the main greenhouse gas blamed for global warming.
However, the plan won’t permit trading in emissions of mercury, a toxic heavy metal that accumulates in the environment. Instead, the CASA team is proposing that all new and existing power plants install state-of-the-art equipment to reduce mercury emissions by 2009.
There would be an exemption to this requirement for old coal-fired power plants that will reach the end of their design life in three or four years beyond 2009, Spink noted.
Industry insisted on this exemption so companies wouldn’t have to spend millions of dollars on costly new technology for old facilities that would soon be shut down.
Team members negotiated a trade-off that all other power plants in the province will have to install technology to cut mercury emissions one year earlier, by 2009 instead of 2010 as originally proposed.
“The bottom line is, we probably saved industry $30 or $40 million by doing that,” Spink said. “We’re actually getting better overall mercury reductions than we would have if (we) just hit all the plants in 2010.”
Kostuch said the plan also includes proposed targets for increasing the use of renewable energy sources.
The plan’s overall approach will be to allow electricity generators to use the fuel of their choice in their plants, as long as the facilities meet the new emission requirements.
That means new coal-fired generators would still be allowed, Kostuch said.
But, she added, the CASA team’s modelling of future generation sources suggests that Alberta is unlikely to see any more new coal-fired power plants built, “based on costs and economics.”
The CASA team stands a good chance of having its plan approved by both the CASA board and provincial cabinet.
Using the CASA model, an earlier team reached agreement on a plan that has reduced oilfield flaring emissions across the province by 60 per cent from flaring levels in 1996.
TransAlta’s Page said CASA’s success “shows that Alberta is really trying to press ahead in this area, and balance on the one side economic development with real environmental improvement.”
