Ottawa Will Postpone New Fuel Standard

The federal government will postpone new emissions standards for gasoline and diesel by a year, but it is still requiring the oil and gas sector to reduce fuel emissions by 2030 because of the increased profits they are currently making.

Last week, the Cabinet approved final regulations for a Clean Fuel Standard (CFS), and The Canadian Press received them today before they were scheduled to be published on July 6.

Due to miscommunications, the regulations were accidentally leaked to provinces before they were supposed to be, and the federal government had to rush on Monday to alert them in time.

“The CFS will be a key tool that complements pollution pricing and the pending oil and gas sector emission cap, to cut emissions and drive the use of clean fuels and technology in Canada,” Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault’s office said Monday.

“Since the previous draft of the CFS, we’ve been working to make this as focused as possible on our end goal— driving down emissions and driving up innovation.”

As part of the Liberals’ first climate plan, which was released in 2016, the Clean Fuel Standard was first promised. It said that by 2030, greenhouse gas emissions would be cut by 30 million tonnes.

The original plan was to have a draft of the regulations ready by the spring of 2020. However, the proposal didn’t come out until December 2021, and then there was a required six-month comment period.

Although the draft regulations said the new standard would be ready in December 2022, the final regulations state that the first compliance check will now happen in December 2023.

Kerosene, jet fuel, and fuel oil were also on the list of fuels that had to meet the rules in the draft regulations, but they are no longer on the list in the final regulations.

In the draft regulations, gasoline was expected to drop carbon intensity by 2.5% by December 2022, based on a baseline number from the average carbon intensity in 2026. In the final plan, they made some small changes to the baseline, it also requires a 3.6% drop for gasoline and a 3.8% drop for diesel by December 2023.

There are many ways to lower the intensity of emissions, such as replacing fossil fuels with clean electricity during the extraction or refining stages, distributing biofuels like ethanol and biodiesel, or investing in vehicles that run on electric or hydrogen fuel.

Original source material for this article taken from here