Did Canadian Environment Minister Jim Prentice speak too presumptively on Friday when he said the capture and sequestration of carbon dioxide is already proven and being applied on a commercial basis?

Speaking in the context of the recently agreed upon U.S.-Canada dialogue on clean energy and the upcoming Copenhagen round of climate talks, The Canadian Press reports that Environment Minister JIm Prentice said that carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) is a critical component of the energy equation that is currently being applied commercially “in enhanced oil recovery kinds of operations” and will be in the future.

Prentice was referring to the Weyburn oilfied project owned and operated by EnCana which receives CO2 transported via pipeline from a lignite-fired coal-to-liquid fuel plant in North Dakota and injects it into underground reservoirs, thereby making the oil fields “more productive.”

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Whenever I’m involved in a discussion about government waste and/or the politics of bureaucratic budgeting, I undoubtedly recount a story that usually leaves people nodding in agreement or shaking their head in disbelief. The story goes like this: A friend of mine we’ll call “Rob,” whom I used to work with during my summer breaks, was coming back to Massachusetts for an unexpected late-September visit. Rob had relocated to Pensacola, Florida where he was learning how to fly jets at the Naval Flight Training School. As Rob lifted the golf clubs out of the nose of the fighter jet he had just flown from Florida to Massachusetts for a one-day visit, he knew his trip was different - and he was a little uneasy about it.

You see, Rob’s day-long visit to play golf in Massachusetts was made possible by an officer (or officers) who rightly feared that ending up with a surplus of fuel at the end of that fiscal year would slash the budget for fuel in the next. Rob’s little visit was back in the early 1990s, but with today’s skyrocketing fuel prices, and the added fuel demands of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the “largest single user of petroleum products in the world” is looking for ways to use less fuel - and more types of it.

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