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Wonder Valley team admits it: Carbon Capture is Too Expensive for Hyperscalers

focus group guy from the TV show I Think You Should Leave, with a subtitle that reads 'Oh, my God, he admit it!'

Kevin O'Leary's Wonder Valley business partner Paul Palandjian publicly concedes that CCS was never really going to happen, promises to 'crush' competition

Kevin O'Leary spent the early part of 2025 visiting Mar-A-Lago with Danielle Smith and telling U.S. media a completely fabricated story that half of Canada is "very interested" in becoming the 51st State. For a brief moment, he was quite possibly the most hated person in Canada.

This brutal PR misstep might be why O'Leary is currently keeping a low profile (at least by his standards) while the planning for his Wonder Valley project quietly chugs along.

In the meantime, Paul Palandjian has been doing the conference panel circuit, including an April appearance at an event called 'West Palm Beach: City of Ideas', organized by Michael Greenwald, head of Financial Innovation and Digital Assets at AWS.

Palandjian, O'Leary's right hand man at O'Leary Ventures, took part in a discussion moderated by Helima Croft, Head of Commodity Strategy at RBC Capital Markets.

The panel, called "Private Investing and the Future of Data Centers and Energy" also included Kathleen Barrón, a VP at Constellation Energy Corporation (the same company that's working with Microsoft to reopen Three Mile Island!), and Adam Rodman, founder & CIO of Segra Capital, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Patrick Bateman, and whose firm is heavily invested in uranium mining and nuclear power.

While the full video isn't (yet?) available, an April post on the Wonder Valley website links to a clip on O'Leary's YouTube channel. I've uploaded a copy to a new YouTube channel just in case.

One small error that Palandjian makes: he claims that the Wonder Valley site is sitting atop "200 trillion metric tons of natural gas" rather than the previously quoted figure of 200 trillion cubic feet. If any of the other panelists noticed the mistake, they certainly didn't let on.

The Big Blunder

But the big blunder that Palandjian made was tactical: he told the truth about the non-viability of Carbon Capture and Storage.

Prior to this, the Wonder Valley team (and the Greenview Industrial Gateway team, and the Alberta Government) had been floating CCS as a way for this and other similar projects to reduce or even eliminate their carbon emissions. Turns out they know it's too expensive to be viable:

"[Carbon capture] is not ready for prime time yet; the efficiency loss when you capture carbon off these gas turbines is massive. So if you're generating 1.4 gigawatts of natural gas power, you'll lose 40% of it just sequestering carbon. And what Michael [Greenwald of AWS] and Amazon cares about is net IT load, you've gotta be able to give them power. So they're out in the market buying carbon credits; the running joke in the data centre business is, the only thing they're recycling is the cups inside the data centres, so, you know, all of these green aspirational stories are great, but it's not happening yet, and we're all trying to figure out how to lower that carbon footprint and do it cleanly. And most people agree that nuclear is the way out, hopefully sooner rather than later."

In other words, the Wonder Valley project will not be sequestering carbon, because it makes the electricity cost more than hyperscalers like AWS are willing to pay.

"We're gonna crush the competition"

Palandjian continued with a rather ominous message:

"I will boldly say the we are gonna win this war, we're gonna crush our competition - but we have the most talented people, we have the most sophisticated financial system and capital markets; I don't see a world in which we could lose, but it's time to act, now."

From this clip alone, it's unclear who the competition is that Palandjian is referring to. However if I were him, I'd be most worried about opposition to the project from local residents, First Nations, climate activists, and others concerned that Wonder Valley could pump obscene amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, and put pressure on water-availability in an already drought-stressed part of the planet that's dealing with massive wildfires on a regular basis.