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Back in November 2025, the Carney government and the Alberta government unveiled their “Memorandum of Understanding” (MoU) that would create a pathway for Alberta to get a million-barrel-per-day oil pipeline built to carry future oilsands production to lucrative markets in Asia.
That pipeline agreement came with many strings attached, including a requirement for the simultaneous “Construction and financing of the world’s largest carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) project for the purpose of making Alberta oil among the lowest carbon intensity produced barrels of oil in the world.” Namely, the Pathways project, to be built by an alliance of Canada’s five largest oilsands companies. To put it mildly, Pathways is not well understood.
From a physical feasibility standpoint, Pathways looks like risky business. While capturing, liquefying and re-injecting carbon dioxide (generated by oil production) to further enhance oil field production has a long history, the idea of capturing it and burying it without using it to generate additional oil production (and profits) has only seen a limited number of pilot projects (with mixed track records) around the world.
Most of those carbon-capture projects underperformed at capturing and storing carbon dioxide emissions, while costing significantly more than expected. According to an analysis of 16 carbon-capture projects around the world, the most effective carbon-capture facilities captured only 78 per cent of the amount of carbon the industry claimed the technology would capture. The average capture rate was only 47.6 per cent.
A second study, which surveyed the literature on the environment, health and safety (EHS) risks of CCUS, showed that just as the physical challenges of constructing and operating such facilities at scale hold many unknowns, so do the EHS dimensions. Indeed, CCUS at scale may pose significant threats to environmental health and safety including stimulating increased seismic activity around carbon injection and storage sites, ground and surface water contamination risks, soil contamination risks, and potentially leakage of carbon dioxide at concentrations hazardous to animal or human health. The most prominent EHS risk attached to CCUS is increased seismic activity.
At one carbon dioxide storage project in central Algeria, thousands of very small seismic events were recorded, with their occurrence closely following changes in carbon dioxide injection rates. Similar behaviour was observed at the Hontomín pilot site in Spain, where small imperceptible seismic events occurred during periods of higher injection pressure and longer injection tests.
In North America, large-scale disposal of saltwater from oil and gas production—an analogue to large-scale carbon dioxide injection—has caused seismicity when injection occurred in formations connected to deep seismic faults. In some cases, very small pressure increases were enough to trigger seismic events. Seismic risk is already a known risk of the hydraulic fracturing (fracking) method of oil and gas production. CCUS will need careful monitoring.
For now, the grand Canada/Alberta pipeline-to-the-pacific deal is moving along at the usual glacial pace for such projects. The issue has fallen off Canada’s news cycle, dwarfed by matters of trade relations with our neighbours to the south.
But Canadians should keep an eye out as the new Pathways carbon capture and storage project proceeds. While our policymakers portray it as something easily achieved, based on evidence from real-world prior use of CCUS, these technologies have underperformed and been shown to pose significant risks to human health and the environment. A cautious eye is required, no matter where you live in Canada.
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