ARE tar sands becoming a bit cleaner? For the first time, a carbon capture and storage (CCS) plant is going to lock away some of the carbon dioxide produced by refining the dirty oil. However, the oil will still lead to more emissions than conventional crude oil.
Tar sands contain bitumen, which is difficult to extract and must then be processed to produce crude. This means tar sands release about 17 per cent more greenhouse-gas emissions overall than conventional oil (Environmental Research Letters, doi.org/cs56qs).
Shell plans to build a CCS plant at its Athabasca Oil Sands Project in Alberta, Canada, to capture emissions from bitumen processing. The Quest plant will come online in late 2015, and will store 1 million tonnes of CO2 underground each year, making it one of the world's largest CCS plants.
However, the new CCS plant will not capture the extra CO2 generated by extracting the thick and sticky bitumen in the first place.
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