Stationary Combustion/
Oil and Gas Extraction

Stationary combustion emissions from the extraction of oil and gas have risen steadily over recent decades. Emissions are dominated by GHGRP-registered facilities located in Alberta, British Columbia, and Saskatchewan. The NAICS classification of these large emitters changed in 2020 from two-way distinction (conventional vs. non-conventional oil extraction) to three-way one (conventional vs. surface-mined oil sands vs. in-situ oil sands).

Refining is a separate, and also large category.

How might Canada reduce oil and gas extraction emissions?

Critical Success Factors

To reduce stationary combustion emissions from oil and gas extraction, it seems required to do some combination of the following:

• Reduce the rate of oil and gas extraction (reduce demand, reduce price, or cap production)
• Increase the rate of exhaust capture to long-term ${\mathrm{C}\mathrm{O}}_2$ storage.
• Reduce emissions releated to process heat for e.g. creating steam, upgrading bitumen to synthetic crude oil, drying gas, and maintaining fluidity in cold weather.
• Reduce emissions related to mechanical energy, powering e.g. compressors and pumps.

Barriers

It is challenging to make progress on the critical success factors above for several reasons:

• Alignment: Oil and gas continue to see enormous, and still-rising, market demand at prices well above the break-even point of oil and gas extraction operations in Canada.
• Geopolitics: Comparable oil and gas operators in the US are scaling up under policies of the Trump administration.
• Geopolitics: Canadian federal ambition is to position Canada as an energy superpower by exporting fossil fuels.
• Lock-in: Extraction facilities, especially for oil sands, are high-capital (billions) that require decades of operation to pay off.
• Cost: Carbon capture technologies exist, but it's costly and unproductive (carbon capture and utilization is less-unproductive, so to speak). The cost for deploying this technology must be borne by some combination of customers, investors, and citizens of various levels of government, without benefit.
• Cost: electric components exist that could replace e.g. gas-powered ones, but they are not cheaper to buy or operate.
• Maturity: The energy efficiency of oil and gas extraction has been improved by decades of engineering. For example, the heat required to melt bitumen to oil already sometimes comes from a co-generation process in which gas turbines generate electricy and their heat exhaust melts the oil. Not only does this power the site's operations, such sites also sell electricity via the provincial grid.
• Scale: Emissions in this sector are over 100Mt/yr, and rising. The sector involves thousands of facilities and connecting pipelines, especially in western provinces. For perspective, the carbon capture and storage projects in Alberta have been operating at just 1-2 Mt/yr since 2016.

Possible Strategies

Posts developing this page

• Stationary Combustion to Extract Oil and Gas: Emissions Calculations (Mar 11, 2026)