Project may offset about 20% of oilsands emissions

This spring, as the coronavirus pandemic battered the global oil industry, a 240-kilometre pipeline that could hold a key to Alberta’s future as an oil and gas-producing region quietly opened.

Known as the Alberta Carbon Trunk Line, the pipeline captures carbon dioxide emitted by a bitumen refinery and a fertilizer plant outside Edmonton, and carries it to an oilfield where it is pumped into the ground. Most of it is forever buried, and some is used to increase the amount of oil recovered.

At its current operational level, the pipeline is projected to capture 1.6 million tonnes of CO2 per year — said to be the equivalent of taking an estimated 300,000 cars off the road — and has the capacity to capture an additional 13 million tonnes of CO2 per year, if sources or emitters can be matched with destinations where it can be stored.

The 14.6 million of sequestered CO2 represents close to 20 per cent of oilsands emissions, and offsets emissions from more than 2.6 million cars in Alberta. It is currently operating at around 11 per cent of that capacity.

The pipeline runs from Alberta’s industrial heartland, situated northeast of Edmonton, for 200 kilometres to oil reservoirs in the central part of the province.

The project shows how Alberta’s fossil fuels sector is taking steps that could help it survive in a world in which carbon emissions is making it a pariah among large institutional investors, who are increasingly focused on climate change.

The ACTL, which has been operating since late March, officially announced its start this week, after the operators involved felt comfortable that the kinks had been worked out.

The project has been more than a decade in the works. It was awarded provincial and federal funding in 2009 and was expected to be operating by 2012, but faced several delays including the oil price crash in 2014.

While the pipeline is billed as the largest pipeline to capture CO2 emissions from human activity, it does not necessarily provide a long-term solution to climate change. Even as it mitigates refinery emissions, it facilitates oil recovery, which may be burned by cars or in other ways, which still creates emissions. Financial Post