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NOVA Chemicals updates community on latest Joffre site news

Apr 22, 2018 | 4:33 PM

Roughly 40 people attended an Open House at the Haynes Community Hall near Clive on April 18 to learn more about the latest updates at NOVA Chemicals near Joffre.

The bi-annual event not only gives the company a chance to hear directly from its neighbours but for nearby residents to be able to ask questions directly from those with the company who work at the site east of Red Deer.

Rick Van Hemmen, Site Leader and Manufacturing Director for NOVA Chemicals, Western Canada says last Wednesday’s event was a fairly routine one in many ways.

“We gave our usual updates on how things are going at the Joffre site for NOVA,” admits Van Hemmen. “That could be everything from business activities to our responsible care. That would be safety, health, environment, emergency response-type updates.”

Van Hemmen says they, along with officials from INEOS cover everything that might be of interest to members of the community or have some sort of an impact on them during these open houses.

“That would include anything like plant outages, major shutdowns, things like that,” explains Van Hemmen. “Some of the more significant projects that we’re working on that are of interest to the community or sometimes visible to the community.”

In terms of site activities this year, Van Hemmen says they informed those in attendance of when their plant outages would be, like a reactor outage coming up at the end of the month which will go on for about 10 days.

“We have a small turnaround in our ethylene 3 plant towards the end of May into late June,” reveals Van Hemmen. “We have a couple of more reactor outages in our poly plants in September time frame. We like to let them know at those outages how many people are going to be on site, whether or not they’ll see significant traffic increases and how we’re going to manage any potential impacts on the surrounding community.”

According to Van Hemmen, those impacts could possibly come from traffic and flaring but points out they always do their best to ensure the impact is as little as possible on the surrounding community.

“For the last handful of years we’ve been working on for example, refurbishment of some of our major furnaces in our ethylene 2 plant that was roughly a $350 million project to do five of our 11 furnaces in that unit,” states Van Hemmen. “We are through all five of those now, we’ve started up a sixth one, it was quite a successful project and now we’re just getting started moving into Phase 2 of those furnace refurbishments.”

Over the next three years, Van Hemmen anticipates another four of the 11 furnaces to be upgraded in ethylene 2 which should result in more efficiency improvements, reduced emissions, noise improvements and capacity improvements as well.

The construction of a new retention pond is another highlight Van Hemmen is pleased to point out, saying it’s largely for storm water run-off containment and re-use in the facilities.

“We had a very old pond, it’s been in service for 40 years,” Van Hemmen explains. “We’re in the process now of commissioning the new retention pond over the next several months and that will allow us then to go ahead and clean up and remediate the old pond and ultimately and probably over a 10 year period, put it back into agricultural land use.”

Van Hemmen says a final key piece they talked about with the community during the last few open houses relates to the company’s updates and renewals of its environmental operating permits.

“We have an overall permit for the site, an operating permit that gets approved on a 10 year cycle by Alberta Environment,” says Van Hemmen. “We’re due for that renewal in 2019 and so we’ve submitted well in advance of that to give Alberta Environment & Parks the time to review, accept the application and then go through their process to work for approval.”

A water works approval will also be needed for the site Van Hemmen adds.

He goes on to say they are also happy to report there were no significant issues or concerns raised by members of the community who attended last week’s open house, just general interest questions and good dialog.

NOVA Chemicals is a major sponsor of the 2019 Canada Winter Games in Red Deer and the Gary W. Harris Canada Games Centre on the campus of RDC.