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The Government of Canada has implemented measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, including a carbon tax and its proposed Clean Fuel Standard. Alberta's Oil Sands industry, arguably one of Canada's largest and most energy intensive industries, has made significant progress towards improving energy efficiency and reducing its fossil energy footprint, including investigating options for integrating bio-based feedstocks into bitumen extraction and processing. Nevertheless, developing sustainable bioenergy supply chains remains a crucial challenge to reaching this goal. This paper investigates pathways for harvesting and hauling biomass residues to produce bio-oil that can replace fossil fuels used in oil sands bitumen processing. A 3–stage grid model is developed, comprising a square grid distribution of harvesting fields and district centres. Biomass is collected and hauled to fast pyrolysis units centrally located within square harvesting fields. Raw bio-oil is hauled from fields to the centre of one of 11 District centres, where it is stabilized and blended. Stage–1 and Stage–2 estimate hauling distance using hypothetical roads described by geometric equations and tortuosity factors. Stage–3 hauling of stabilized bio-oil from District centres to upgraders at Scotford AB and Fort McMurray AB is estimated by using web-based mapping tools and actual road networks. Total diesel requirements for hauling are calculated using total distances obtained from the 3–stage hauling model. Average diesel consumption obtained from the model is 0.32 L per 1000 L of bio-oil produced, increasing to 3.45 L per 1000 L bio-oil delivered to district centres. Total diesel consumption is 10.23 and 14.40 L per 1000 L bio-oil delivered to Scotford and Ft. McMurray, respectively. The model shows that co-processing of biomass residues can reduce the fossil energy footprint of processing oil sands synthetic crude oil by 22–28%. The quantity of delivered bio-oil is sufficient to replace petroleum coke and synthetic crude oil used for combustion as well as a substantial fraction of natural gas fuel. Moreover, the model can help to determine the most suitable processing and hauling options at each stage in order to minimize diesel fuel requirements, and the model framework can be extended to other jurisdictions as well as other industries. • 3–stage hauling model for biomass and bio-oil destined for bitumen upgraders. • Diesel requirement estimated using hypothetical and actual road networks. • 87% of bio-oil's energy can replace fossil inputs to synthetic crude production. • Energy footprint is lower by 22% for SAGD operations and 28% for mining operations. • Model is applicable to other jurisdictions and other energy intensive industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the fact that Canada withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol in 2011, we study the impact of loosening environmental policies on firm performance of Canada's oil and gas sector. This work complements the limitation of Porter hypothesis, which only discusses the relationship between environmental policy and corporate performance from the perspective of strict environmental policy. Hence, this paper adopts investment efficiency to measure corporate performance, and discusses the long-term and heterogeneous effects of loose environmental policies on Canada's oil and gas firms. We find that environmental policy loosening is conducive to improving the investment efficiency of oil and gas enterprises, which declines annually and becomes stable at a certain level. However, the biggest beneficiaries of loose environmental policies are low-investment-efficiency firms and oil sand firms. This result suggests that environmental policy loosening can boost the performance of enterprises, but alleviate their emission reduction pressure at the same time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The industrial sector, accounting for 30% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, is among the key drivers of human-induced climate change impacts. Given this volume of emissions, the sector could play a critical role in mitigating climate change. Canada is among the top 10 global GHG emitters and its industrial sector is responsible for more than 39% of national emissions. GHG emissions from the sector increased by almost 32% between 1990 and 2017 and are expected to almost double by 2050 if no measures are taken. This paper aims to evaluate how different technical and economic factors have contributed to the increasing GHG emission trends in Canada's industrial sector between 1990 and 2014. The Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index was developed and implemented as the decomposition method. Results from the analysis suggest that activity level is the biggest contributor to the increase in industrial GHG emissions between 1990 and 2014, which ranged from 5 Mt CO 2 eq in 1994 to 57 Mt CO 2 eq in 2014 compared to the 1990 baseline. Increased shares of low carbon-intensive industries and fuel switching contribute to GHG emission mitigation from the sector. The structural change is responsible for GHG reductions of 1.1 and 23.4 Mt CO 2 eq in 2000 and 2014, respectively. The impacts from fuel mixs and increased shares of low-carbon fuel ranged from −1 Mt CO 2 eq in 1994 to 16 Mt CO 2 eq in 2011. Despite improvements in process-energy-intensity (i.e., the energy consumed per unit of product) in several industries, changes in economic energy intensity (energy consumed per unit of economic output) have resulted in increased GHG emissions. These changes are mainly driven by changes in the process-energy intensity of the oil sands mining sector, the largest contributor to industrial GHG emissions in Canada. Image 107490 • Historical GHG emissions trends from Canada's industrial sector were analyzed. • GHG emissions decomposition analysis was done for the years 1990–2014. • The impacts of driving factors on increasing GHG emission trends were examined. • Activity level was found to be the main driver of GHG emissions. • Fuel switching and electricity decarbonization mitigate industrial GHGs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]