Remember Stéphane Dion's early speeches on the environment shortly after he became Liberal leader? I'm paraphrasing but it went something like, if Canada can lead the way in figuring out how to cut megatonnes of greenhouse gas emissions, Canada can make megatonnes of money.

So here's a report from CIBC Capital Markets economist Benny Tal [PDF] that talks about cutting greenhouse gas emissions and getting rich at the same time. Tal published this in December (I've recently had a chance to wade through the pile in my "must-read" box) and while some of the numbers have a change a little since then, the overall premise still works.

With no restrictions on emissions, companies have no economic motivation to apply such an option. Things, however, are changing. Soon, the right to emit will come with a price tag. And the surprise will be how little it will take to convince large emitters that injecting CO2 into the ground will make more economic sense than spreading it into the atmosphere...

In this context, due to its proximity to some of the world’s finest geological storage sites, Alberta’s oil patch is ideally located to
benefit from this emissions reduction option.
Instead of being the victim of environmental
regulations, the oil patch might emerge
victorious in the carbon war . . .

. . .Current estimates put the full-life cycle cost of pre-
combustion CCS at roughly $40 per tonne of CO2 —
notably cheaper than using the post-combustion
technology. But these cost estimates are being
revised downward almost daily, and the consensus is that
pre-combustion capture will be 25-30% cheaper within a
decade. In an environment of rising carbon prices, it may
not be long before the cost curve of capture and the cost
curve of emitting intersect. Accordingly, a price signal
of $20-25 per tonne of CO
can trigger a significant acceleration in the utilization of pre-combustion CCS [carbon capture and storage] as an economically feasible method of emissions reduction in
the oil sands. Incidentally, under the federal government’s
Green Plan, the price tag on carbon is scheduled to rise
to $20 per tonne of CO
by 2013.