e. The Oil and Gas Industry’s Re-investments to Reduce Emissions Has Been Contemptible

Regarding Mr. Cameron’s statement about “significantly more funding” being “infused”, the federal government has promised billions of dollars to oil and gas producers, in the form of an Investment Tax Credit (the “ITC”), to achieve reductions from Carbon Capture and Storage.

The CCUS Investment Tax Credit (ITC) announced in 2022, proposes to provide a 50 per cent credit for equipment associated with point-source CCUS projects, declining in 2030 and 2040 to incent early adoption…

Canada’s federal government expects to commit C$8.6 billion by 2030 to the announced ITC alone—double the funds that the U.S. federal government has earmarked for the extended 45Q tax credit in the Inflation Reduction Act by 2031 (about C$4.3 billion). [60]

Meanwhile, in 2022, the oil and gas producing companies that operate in the oilsands had a combined available cashflow of $58 billion.  They returned half of that, i.e. $29 billion, to shareholders in the form of share repurchases and increased dividends. [61]

According to Posing as Canadian by Gordon Laxer in 2021, 97% of the oil produced by the organizations on the board of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers came from fully or majority foreign-owned corporations. [62]  Therefore, the vast majority of that $29 billion in 2022 was almost certainly paid to foreign shareholders.

The Pathways Alliance is an association of six oil producing companies that, together, produce almost all of the oil from the oilsands. [63] In the fourth quarter of 2022, it dedicated $10 million to an engineering study on a planned carbon dioxide pipeline project. That represented 0.07% of the constituent companies’ cashflow in Q4 2022. It did not announce any other spending for oilsands emissions reduction projects. [64]

In its “Waiting to Launch 2023 mid-year update”, the Pembina Institute stated that the oilsands producers’ profits were on track to be the second highest in the last decade, “with 75% of all available cashflow returned to shareholders in the form of share repurchases and increased dividends”.  It also stated, “financial reports from oilsands companies show no new investments or actions to reduce emissions in the last six months”. [65]

It is entirely obvious what these companies are doing:  They are extracting as much money as they can from their operations  and returning it to their shareholders, for as long as they can, and doing as little as they can to reduce GHG emissions from production.

Recommendations:

• Tell the federal government (using references to the papers we cite here, as you may wish):

• The federal government must acknowledge that the oil and gas companies are not acting in good faith when they purport to be working to reduce their emissions from production.  The government should do everything in its power to make the oil and gas producers significantly cut their emissions.