This facility in Estevan, Saskatchewan, is designed to capture and store
carbon dioxide. If the technology proves to be sufficiently effective and
inexpensive, this procedure could be used to significantly reduce
Canada’s GHG emissions.
Ken Gillespie/Newscom
The Emissions-Prevention Approach: Carbon
Capture and Storage
The second approach to reducing the GHG intensity of energy—the
emissions-prevention approach—is to continue reaping the enormous
economic benefits that come from carbon-based energy production, but
to minimize the associated environmental costs. In other words, we
continue to burn fossil fuels to produce energy but prevent the harmful
GHG emissions from escaping into the atmosphere. Instead, the GHGs
could be “captured” and stored safely, either in secure manufactured
storage containers or, perhaps more realistically, in the sedimentary
layers from which the oil and natural gas were originally extracted. In
principle, this is a promising possibility, as the depleted oil and gas