Could a conservative Canadian province go carbon neutral with renewables?
Saskatchewan has all of the renewables potential to do it, but does it have the will
Saskatchewan isn’t just a hard-to-spell Canadian province, but also an interesting and unfortunate outlier in the country.
As this chart shows, it’s one of the few provinces with substantially increasing CO2 emissions as opposed to recent declines. But that’s not the entire story. While it’s a huge land area covering 651,036 square kilometers, making it larger than 80% of the countries in the world, it only has 1.17 million inhabitants, so its emissions per capita are among the worst in the world. As a province, instead of cutting coal and gas, it had decided to accept the lobbying efforts of the fossil fuel industry and try carbon capture and sequestration, along with the usual enhanced oil recovery that makes it a bait-and-switch. Their Boundary Dam coal plant CCS and EOR plant has failed miserably, and they wasted the usual billions before admitting that carbon capture is too expensive because physics. Unsurprisingly, they are also one of the provinces without an electric vehicle rebate.
