A Calgary company that specializes in storing industrial emissions broke ground on what will be the country’s largest carbon storage project, and the province’s energy minister called it a race against the Americans.
Enhance Energy Inc. said its Origins carbon capture and storage hub in central Alberta will bury up to 1.5 million tonnes of CO2 a year, which is said to be the equivalent of taking more than 500,000 cars off the road.
Brian Jean, Alberta’s minister of energy and minerals, said the province is competing with the United States on carbon storage — and that it has to come out on top.
“I watched the United States doing something very similar, and we are in a race, and we need to win that race,” Jean said Wednesday.
He tied the technology to the province’s hopes to double oil production to eight million barrels a day; a target Premier Danielle Smith has said could take 10 to 15 years. “If we are going to do what we think we’re gonna do and double production, we can’t do it without CCUS,” Jean said, using the industry shorthand for carbon capture, utilization and storage.
Candice Paton, vice-president of corporate affairs at Enhance Energy, kicked off the groundbreaking ceremony and told the crowd that 65 people were working behind the stage on a pipeline that will carry CO2 to the hub in Clive, a small community.
At a time when tariff wars between the United States and Canada are in full swing, Paton noted the pipe is built out of Canadian steel manufactured in Saskatchewan and rolled in Alberta. The line is designed for multiple users and connects the hub into the province’s CO2 transportation backbone.
Enhance Energy Inc. has been putting CO2 underground at Clive since 2020 but not simply storing it. The company uses carbon to recover oil from reservoirs that had stopped producing decades ago, a process called enhanced oil recovery. Origins does the opposite. The CO2 goes into deep saltwater formations and stays there permanently.
Origins are fed by the same Alberta Carbon Trunk Line, one of the largest CO2 pipelines in the world, which gathers carbon from industrial plants north of Edmonton.
The ceremony opened with a land acknowledgement from Lacey Yellowbird, executive director of the Maskwacis Employment Centre, who told the crowd it was gathered on Treaty 6 territory. She is from Samson Cree Nation in Maskwacis and said the centre has been supported by the company.
Tim Hodgson, the federal minister of energy and natural resources, was asked by a reporter about the economics of the project, given that Alberta’s carbon credits have been trading at a fraction of the province’s compliance price.
“I fundamentally disagree with the premise of the question,” Hodgson said. “The entire point of the memorandum of understanding between Alberta and the federal government were to create a functioning carbon market, and that’s what we’re doing.”
Jean took the same question and brought it back to the oil.
“Right now, Alberta produces some of the lowest-emission heavy oil in the world,” he said.
Chris Kupchenko, president and chief executive officer of Enhance Energy Inc., closed the event by comparing the hub to the Canadian Pacific Railway, built 140 years earlier.
“Both being nation building projects in their time that every Canadian can be proud of,” Kupchenko said.
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