Enbridge says carbon project still ‘go’ despite Capital exit

CALGARY — Enbridge Inc.’s proposal to build a major carbon storage hub in Alberta remains on the table, the company said Friday, in spite of Capital Power’s recent decision to shelve its own $2.4-billion project associated with the plan.

Enbridge executive vice-president Colin Gruending said the move by Capital Power to cancel a high-profile CCUS project proposed for its Genesee natural gas-fired power plant near Edmonton is “disappointing.”

But he added another proposed carbon capture project in the area, at Heidelberg Materials’ cement plant, remains in the works and keeps Enbridge’s own proposed storage hub alive. “That [Heidelberg] project has garnered some more financial support, and we’ll be working with them to consider FID [final investment decision] later this year,” Gruending said. “So the Wabamun Open Access Hub will generally continue.”

CCUS — or carbon capture, utilization and storage — is a technology that traps harmful emissions from industrial processes and stores them deep underground to prevent them from entering the atmosphere.

Pipeline company Enbridge and electricity generator Capital Power agreed in 2021 to jointly evaluate CCUS solutions in Alberta. Capital Power had proposed to build a carbon capture facility at its Genesee plant, while Enbridge would build the storage hub.

Capital Power said last week that while it believes its Genesee carbon capture project is technically viable, it concluded the economics don’t work.

Enbridge has already received permission from the government of Alberta to develop the underground hub, dubbed the Wabamun Open Access Hub. The company’s plan is for the hub to be scalable to meet the carbon storage needs of multiple industrial emitters in the area, making it potentially one of the largest underground CCUS hubs in the world.