Climate Policy Engagement Analysis
Climate Policy Engagement Overview: Pathways Alliance (Pathways) or the Oil Sands Pathways to Net-Zero – a group of six oil sands producers in Canada – demonstrates negative engagement on climate policy. The group is oppositional to federal climate regulation in Canada and advocates for continued oil and gas production. (See note below on Pathways’ response to Canada’s Competition Act Amendments and how it impacts this assessment).
Top-line Messaging on Climate Policy: Pathways has a combination of positive and negative top-line positions on climate change. Communications from the group’s website recognize climate change as a “critical challenge” and supports emissions reduction, often with limited clarity on pace and timelines for the latter. Pathways appears unsupportive of climate change regulations: in its comments to the federal government in October 2023, it argued that policies should avoid duplication and carbon leakage and opposed “prescriptive” policy approaches.
Engagement with Climate-Related Regulations: Pathways appears to be opposed to several strands of climate regulations. Pathways has strongly campaigned against the Oil and Gas Emission Cap. In March 2024 Pathways sent a joint industry letter to Minister of Environment and Climate Change, Steven Guilbeault, advocating for the withdrawal of the cap. It also opposed the policy in an October 2022 submission, stating that the policy had “impractical timeframes.”
Pathways was also unsupportive of the Methane Regulation for the Upstream Oil and Gas Sector in comments submitted in February 2024, and advocated to weaken the flaring criteria and the scope of emissions considered in the regulation. It also did not support the draft Clean Electricity Regulations that sets a GHG emissions standard on electricity generation units in October 2023 comments. On this policy, it advocated for weakening the policy timelines from 2035 to 2050 and called for exemptions for co-generation plants.
The group’s December 2022 comments on amendments to the Output-based Pricing System appeared unsupportive of the carbon tax, stating that the tax would lead to increased regulatory costs.
Positioning on Energy Transition: Pathways advocates for a long-term role for oil and gas in the energy mix. In a letter to the government in March 2024, the group advocated for continued oil and gas production. Pathways often supports the decarbonization of Canadian oil production, claiming that Canada could produce “cleanest” and “responsibly produced” barrels of oil in the world. However, the group has not acknowledged the emissions that arise during the final use of oil (Scope 3 emissions) which tends to be the highest source of emissions in oil value chain.
A significant portion of Pathways’ advocacy is focused on promoting technology-led solutions for decarbonization, mainly carbon capture and storage (CCS/CCUS), while the group’s support for the energy transition appears to be predicated on government support for CCS. For instance, in October 2023, Pathways Vice-President, Mark Cameron provided a testimony to a federal government committee in support of the CCUS Investment Tax Credit (ITC) and advocated for other government incentives for CCS. In the September 2023 pre-budget submission, as summarized in the group's website, supported the federal CCUS ITC for decarbonizing oil production. However, it has not communicated support for reducing the use of oil and gas, in line with the IPCC recommendations for a net-zero energy mix by 2050. Despite the overwhelming support for CCS, Pathways has opposed the CCS requirements for fossil-fuel fired co-generation plants under the draft Clean Electricity Regulations in October 2023 comments.
Note: As of June 2024, Pathways Alliance has withdrawn parts of the website that communicated about climate change. A statement on the website attributes this to the “uncertainty” from Competition Act Amendments in Canada. Therefore, any InfluenceMap assessment of evidence taken from the Pathways’ website or social media communications assessed in this profile should be considered as a reflection of the entity’s climate policy positions up to June 2024 only. InfluenceMap will continue to produce assessments of Pathways’ climate policy engagement using other data sources outlined in our methodology.