Alberta is investing $131 million in projects designed to help prevent carbon emissions from entering the atmosphere.

Up to $131 million from Alberta's Technology Innovation and Emissions Reduction (TIER) fund is being funnelled into Alberta's Industrial Energy Efficiency and Carbon Capture Utilization and Storage program, Premier Jason Kenney announced Thursday.

"The critical debate over hydrogen development is how best to extract it at scale."

As we continue to follow energy-related developments that impact our members, the rapid growth of hydrogen production is of particular interest, with implications for Boilermaker jobs and the continued use of fossil fuels with carbon capture, use and storage (CCUS).

The Rural Electrification Act was signed into law 85 years ago this month. It was a visionary infrastructure program for the 20th century, the centerpiece of a federal energy investment strategy that brought growth and prosperity to the South, the West, and across rural America. Because of these investments, generations of Americans were wealthier, healthier and led better lives.

In June, 2014, a man began digging into the soft red earth in the back yard of his house, on the outskirts of Kolwezi, a city in the southern Democratic Republic of the Congo. As the man later told neighbors, he had intended to create a pit for a new toilet. About eight feet into the soil, his shovel hit a slab of gray rock that was streaked with black and punctuated with what looked like blobs of bright-turquoise mold. He had struck a seam of heterogenite, an ore that can be refined into cobalt, one of the elements used in lithium-ion batteries.

If we want any chance of meeting the ambitious climate goals laid out by the 2015 Paris Agreement, it’s becoming increasingly clear that we’ll need to find a way to actually reverse past emissions.

That’s why a team of scientists from the University of California San Diego and Texas A&M University published a call to arms, Wired reports, saying that a “wartime-like crash deployment” of carbon capture technology will play a crucial part in saving us from climate change-induced devastation.