Photo credit: Flickr user m.gifford

Toby Heaps caught up with Keating in Alberta shortly after the acquisition.

Toby Heaps: Where do you think Alberta stands with regards to the environment?

John Keating: I think there’s enormous number of environmentally conscious people in Alberta, regardless of what industry they work in. People in Alberta are concerned about the environment, about the air we breathe. Albertans are a pretty special group of people: we live here because we enjoy the outdoors.

TH: What made you get into this stuff?

JK: I would say it goes right back to the National Energy program. The mid-80s, when the price of oil and natural gas just plummeted, there were no economics in the industry, so I became rather disillusioned with it. We started out with oil and gas, but there was just no economics.

TH: If Alberta was in a clean energy stream, what would it look like?

JK: I think in 20, 50 years we will still be producing and exporting fossil fuels. There’s no question about it. I think coal gas application technology will probably be on the horizon as well, if it’s a question of C02 that will be taken care of by eliminating large, existing polluting power plants.
There’s no silver bullet…we can all talk about it, but there’s no technology that’s going to come around that is so disruptive that it shuts down the production of coal. It’s just not going to happen.

We don’t have a lot of water resources, but we do have mountainous terrain, so you can use hydroelectric power to create storage basis for water coming up and down. We’ve got enormous wind resources and there have been advances in utility-scale electric storage to do what we need.
There are several large-scale utility storage units in the US, Europe, none in Canada, but there are some parties looking into it, you could have it in Ontario and Alberta, you could have it in Saskatchewan.

TH: What would be the best resource to pump it up?

JK: Wind and power [are] great partners, and if we’re putting $2 billion into testing carbon sequestration in Alberta, you’d think that we could invest $2 billion into testing something like renewable energy storage. Until the price of carbon is tackled against electricity—in a realistic way, not $15/tonne—then alternatives like C02 sequestration might become irrelevant.