While announcing grants to oil companies to fund greenhouse gas emissions reductions projects on Thursday, the province launched an attack against Ottawa’s pledge to mandate emissions reductions across the oil industry.

At a press conference detailing more than $100 million for carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) and emissions reductions projects, Premier Jason Kenney took the opportunity to draw the line on proposed federal policy to require emissions reductions as part of Ottawa’s pledge to trim emissions 40-45 per cent in nine years, and to net zero by 2050.

Kenney claimed constitutional authority to block any such efforts, and said there was not a “chance in hell” of Canada meeting its climate change obligations without co-operation from Alberta.

The seven projects announced Thursday could cut 2.9 megatonnes (MT) of emissions by 2030, according to the province, which emitted 276 MT in 2019.

At the United Nations climate conference in Glasgow (COP26), Prime Minister Justin Trudeau affirmed his election campaign promise to implement hard caps on the oil and gas industry, which represent Canada’s largest and fastest growing source of GHG emissions.

Oilsands emissions have ballooned to 83 MT in 2019 from 35 MT in 2005, ratcheting up overall industry emissions to 191 MT, now 26 per cent of Canada’s total emissions. Several oil companies have pledged to meet 2050 net-zero targets, but have not set interim goals.

The premier said Ottawa’s pledge to introduce emissions limits “seems to have been a improvised talking point for the Glasgow audience. Maybe that’s why there was no consultation with the province that owns the third largest reserves of oil on the face of the earth. Maybe that’s why they didn’t bother to pick up the phone and speak to the province that actually regulates the production of that resource. That’s my only explanation.”

He said he told Trudeau, with whom he shared the stage for an announcement on Monday, that “we needed to meet urgently about these issues. And, either we’ll be taking a group of ministers down to Ottawa shortly, or inviting federal ministers to come to Alberta, to get in a room and talk through these issues.

“Because our message for Ottawa is absolutely clear. If you want to have a snowball’s chance in hell of coming close to these increasingly ambitious targets, you have to co-operate with the government and the people who own and develop the world’s third largest oil reserves. We are not an afterthought.”

Kenney did not differentiate between control over natural resources and jurisdiction over GHG emissions or abiding by international treaties involving emissions. This is not, he said, “a conventional political back-and-forth issue…. The highest law of the land, the Constitution of Canada, says that we own those resources, and we get exclusively to control their production.”

He added, “This is not a subject for debate. And so if they want policy that constrains the development of our resources under our constitutional authority, they have to deal with Alberta.”

Jason Nixon, minister of Environment and Parks, added that he would be “educating” the new minister of Environment and Climate Change Steven Guilbeault at an afternoon meeting about Alberta’s position on emissions.

“We will be expressing the same concerns that the premier has expressed with his federal counterpart and other colleagues of mine have with theirs. And that is the fact that we have not been consulted at all on what was said in Glasgow,” Nixon said.

“We frankly don’t know what the federal environment minister is up to. I will say, this afternoon, my focus will be on educating the minister on what is actually taking place in Alberta. He has said some outrageous things, particularly in Glasgow, about what our oil and gas industry in particular is doing when it comes to climate change and the management of GHG emissions. And so we’ve [scheduled] some time this afternoon to make sure he understands that we have a world-class industry here that is leading the way and we’re focused on real results inside the province of Alberta.”

He said the province wants to see “the federal government to meet that ambition of real results, and to stop going around and setting targets. The federal government has not met one target in decades on this issue.”

The federal-provincial confrontation may have been inevitable as Ottawa encounters increasing international pressure to accomplish deep emissions cuts while the province insists it cannot cut emissions without billions of dollars in federal funding for costly projects like CCUS and transition to a hydrogen based economy that would allow for continued oil and gas extraction.

Climate scientists say GHG emissions causing global warming has to be cut about seven per cent per year this decades to gain a two-thirds chance of staying below a 1.5 C rise in global temperatures, the goal set by the Paris accord.

Unlike most high emissions jurisdictions around the world, Alberta — whose 2019 GHG emissions exceeded that of countries like Ukraine, Venezuela and the Philippines — has no emissions reductions targets and has indicated it has no intent to establish any.