Candice Patton, Vice-President of Corporate Affairs for Enhance Energy, speaks to at the Red Deer & District Chamber luncheon on Tuesday at River Bend Golf & Recreation Area. (rdnewsNOW/Alessia Proietti)

By Alessia Proietti

"building a Central Alberta Carbon Hub"

Red Deerians learn about carbon capture and waste-to-energy initiatives in region at Chamber luncheon

Apr 16, 2024 | 5:13 PM

At a Red Deer & District Chamber luncheon on Tuesday, guests learnt about sustainable energy initiatives taking place in the region, particularly in carbon capture storage (CCS) and waste-to-energy (WTE).  

Held at the River Bend Golf & Recreation Area, speakers included Sean Collins, Chief Executive Officer of Varme Energy in his waste-to-energy project, and Candice Paton, Vice-President of Corporate Affairs of Enhanced Energy in her CCS initiative.  

In November 2023, the towns of Blackfalds and Penhold were the latest to approve non-binding letters of intent see a WTE facility built near Innisfail. Sylvan Lake and Innisfail signed earlier in the year. 

READ: Blackfalds and Penhold latest to show interest in Varme waste-to-energy facility near Innisfail 

WASTE-TO-ENERGY 

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Collins shared that the 500 WTE facilities already exist in Europe, transforming 100 million tons of waste into energy, like heat, per year. He says 90 per cent of Canada’s waste, or 26 million tons, is currently landfilled per year.  

“We highlight that it’s an often forgotten part that’s a significant cost and forwarding legacy for citizens within that community. You can’t build anything that’s got a human-oriented development above a landfill for 100 years and so you’re neutralizing that land for multiple generations to come,” he said.  

With no WTE facilities in the province yet, the company has already locked in Norwegian investment and has a facility in the works near Edmonton.  

To build a facility in the region, he says about 100,000 tons of waste are needed for the project to be economically viable, financed through tipping fees, power generation, and carbon credits. Tax credits in Alberta are currently at 62 per cent through provincial and federal initiatives.  

With four municipalities already on board, he says they need one more large municipality, like the City of Red Deer, Red Deer County, or Airdrie, to join and hopes to have that relationship established within the next year.  

With the average person using 500 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of power production in a single-family home per year, he says the Edmonton facility estimates their WTE facility will translate into 15 megawatts, or enough to power roughly 20,000 houses per year.  

He estimates a facility in central Alberta could power a quarter of the homes in just the City of Red Deer, without an increase on resident utility bills.  

In central Alberta, the project could attract roughly $300 million in investment, divert 8.4 million pounds of garbage over its 25-year lifespan, create 300 temporary jobs in engineering and construction and 30 fulltime jobs to run the facility, and create value added streams by diverting metals and ash to manufacturers.  

The facility also intends to incorporate carbon capture storage by partnering with Enhance Energy.  

Collins says the region is perfect as it sits on a prime geological bed for low-cost carbon sequestration, which is the process of removing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere and storing it, typically underground. 

“We’ve got a royal flush on this thing. We know how to drill wells, we’ve got great geology, we have a really skilled workforce, we have the facilities with the carbon to put into the pipleines,” he said.  

CARBON CAPTURE STORAGE 

Enhance Energy’s current Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage (CCUS) facility, located near Clive, is now one of about seven projects around the world that is capturing and sequestering more than one million tons of carbon per year, reaching their fifth million this March, said Paton.  

Transporting carbon from the Sturgeon Refinery and Nutrien’s fertilizer plant in Fort Saskatchewan through 240 km of pipeline to the facility in Clive, she says their enhanced oil recovery sequestration project allows carbon to be permanently stored in reservoirs two kilometres below surface level, while allowing the remaining oil on location to be more efficiently produced.  

These reservoirs, namely rocks, she says, have stored oil and gas for millions of years and are essentially putting carbon back where it came from. Their new project under development, Origins, aims to build on their work at the Clive facility, and will continue to permanently store CO2 at the location.  

“Leaning on the history of the oil and gas industry, we’ve explored, we’ve got a lot of knowledge of reservoirs, rock behaviour, and geomechanics and all of those sorts of systems. It really makes central Alberta a place that’s well understood for its great properties that will make great storage,” she said.  

They also generate carbon credits, a certificate representing the avoided release of one metric ton of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere, through the use of their provincially approved monitoring, measurement and verification plan. 

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