Climate change policy and Canada's oil sand resources : Update and appraisal of Canada's new regulatory framework for air emissions

The approach used can be summarised as: • modelling future expansion of the industry on the basis of a database of planned and proposed projects; • on the basis of the same database, predicting the share of different technologies and their future expansion; and 1. Pembina Institute (2005): The Climate Implications of Canada’s Oil Sands Development, Matthew Bramley, Derek Neabel and Dan Woynillowic [...] As can be seen from the figure, the scale of the necessary reductions in other provinces that are implied by the Government of Alberta’s targets range from the significant to the unfeasible depending on the scenario. [...] In terms of the former, Section 3 has provided an assessment of the expansion of oil sands and relevant emission targets which, in short, concludes that any unmitigated emissions that accompany the projected oil sand expansion do pose a significant problem, both in terms of the risk of not achieving Kyoto commitments and, more widely, the climate change implications that the Kyoto Protocol seeks t [...] In terms of the level of emissions reduction that is required to address this problem, a simple comparison between the unmitigated emissions (Table 3.3) and the implied target emissions for oil sands under the various target scenarios (Table 3.2) provides data on the annual reduction in emission required to stay within the various targets. [...] However, in relation to the 2012 target alone, for the base case NEB projections (which are likely to be the closest to the ‘real’ expansion), a cut in annual unmitigated emissions of 70% would be required for the industry to stay at 12% of Alberta’s target 30% share of Canada’s emission.