Genome Alberta will be spending $11.6 million Canadian ($10.3 million) to study, among other things, how biology might help mitigate the environmental costs of one of the planet's more troublesome fossil fuel reserves – Canada's heavy oil sands.
The Calgary-based nonprofit will specifically study the organisms that naturally live in oil sands and coal beds, with an eye toward finding out how they're involved in the "natural cracking of hydrocarbons that produce methane and carbon dioxide."
That, in turn, could help in finding ways to cut water and energy use in oil extraction and coal mining, as well as reduce methane emissions from the massive tailings ponds left over from the process, the nonprofit said.
Oil sands are an environmental bugbear, given the large amounts of water and energy needed to dig them up and steam the oil out of them, not to mention the greenhouse gas emissions that result from the process.
That greenhouse gas footprint had been one contentious issue among many in climate legislation now working its way through Congress (see House Energy Bill Draft: Cap-and-Trade Included and Green Light post).
Previous versions of the bill had sought to link the greenhouse gas emissions of a nation's energy sources to potential trade restrictions, something Canadian officials protested.
The version of the bill that emerged from a key House committee on Thursday didn't have those provisions. Neither did it include a low carbon fuel standard that could have measured a fuel's greenhouse gas emission impacts from production to burning.
The California Air Resources Board in April approved just such a standard, drawing the ire of Canadian officials (see California Adopts Low Carbon Fuel Standard). Mary Nichols, the board's chairwoman, said Thursday that the state may face a legal challenge from the Canadian government over the issue (see Green Light post).
All of this is likely to boost interest in finding ways to reduce the carbon footprint of oil sand extraction, giving Genome Alberta plenty to work on.
