Alberta Carbon Trunk Line System

The Alberta Carbon Trunk Line (ACTL) is a pipeline owned and operated Wolf Midstream, which is in length and part of a $CDN1.2 billion system that captures carbon dioxide from industrial emitters in the Alberta's Industrial Heartland and transports it to "central and southern Alberta for secure storage" in "aging reservoirs", and enhanced oil recovery (EOR) projects. The pipeline, upstream carbon capture infrastructure and downstream EOR project, which is owned and operated by Enhance Energy, came online on June 2, 2020 and are part of the ACTL System, which is the largest carbon capture and storage (CCS) system" in Alberta, Canada.

Background

In September 2010, the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency (CEAA) approved the project.

The ACTL, which was partially financed through federal government programs and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) was constructed and is owned and operated Wolf Midstream. CPPIB is Wolf Midstream's principal investor. Funding included up to $CDN305 million from CPPIB, as well as $CDN63 million from the Harper administration's Eco Energy Innovation Initiative and Clean Energy Fund. Alberta approved "$CDN223 million in "construction funding" for the ACTL System through Alberta's Carbon Capture and Storage Funding Act (2009).

Construction began at the end of 2018, and ACTL went online on June 2, 2020.

In the first phase, the ACTL System project partners—North West Redwater Partnership's (NWRP) Sturgeon Refinery and Nutrien's Redwater Fertilizer facility in the Heartland—provide "4,400 tonnes per day of high purity " to be transported through the pipeline to Enhance Energy's aging Clive Nisku and Leduc field reservoirs.

ACTL has the capacity to transport a maximum of 14.6 million tonnes of annually.

The third facet of the project is Enhance Energy's Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) operation. Clive legacy oil field's full scale EOR operation—which will recover oil from fields at a depth of below ground—will be the first in Alberta. The cost of water management at the Clive legacy oil field—which still held "vast oil reserves"—had closed "oil revenue profit margins". Enhance Energy expects to recover 47 million barrels of oil at the Clive field, which represents "between 40 and 50% of the total oil in place."

Government subsidies

Public subsidies enabled the launch of the first "oil sands project to capture and bury carbon emissions" in 2015—Shell Canada Quest Energy project (SCQEP). Both SCQEP and Carbon Trunk Line's Enhance Energy received hundreds of millions in government financial support for Alberta's two largest carbon capture projects.

The $1.3-billion SCQEP at the Scotford complex, located northeast of Edmonton—which became operational in 2015—was almost completely paid for with funding from the Alberta government of $745 million and $120 million from the federal government. At the 2015 SCQEP launch, the provincial government under the Premier Rachel Notley, said at that time it had no further plans to "fund future efforts using the technology." A previous public and private partnership project in 2012 had been forced to cancel "similar plans to retrofit a coal-fired power plant in Alberta, citing the absence of carbon pricing policies". Shell hired the environmental group, the Pembina Institute, to advise them on the SCQEP project. A Pembina Institute director, Duncan Kenyon, said the "government should strengthen existing carbon pricing to encourage carbon capture."

Whitecap Resources

A similar but much larger project located near Weyburn, Saskatchewan, Canada, called the Weyburn-Midale Carbon Dioxide Project, is owned and operated by Whitecap Resources, a Calgary, Alberta-based public Canadian oil company founded in 2009. Emissions from a North Dakota coal power plant and the Dakota Gasification facility are transported to an oilfield in region south of Regina, in neighbouring Saskatchewan—the Weyburn oilfields. Whitecap has operations in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia. According to a 2008 article in ''Canadian Geographic Magazine'', at that time the Weyburn carbon monitoring and storage project was the world's largest carbon capture and storage project.

Enhance Energy

By January 2021, Enhance Energy (Enhance) was reporting that it was producing an estimated 200 barrels a day (BOE/D). The company anticipated that carbon capture technology would result in an expanding production of about 4,000 or 5,000 BOE/D. Kevin Jabusch, president and CEO of Enhanced Energy says that since his company is "carbon mitigation company" not an oil company, and would therefore would benefit as the carbon tax increases. Eventually, Enhance would no longer "need to produce oil anymore to be profitable".

References

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Pipelines in Alberta
Transport buildings and structures in Alberta