The Alberta Carbon Trunk Line is now fully online

Alberta Carbon Trunk Line

The Alberta Carbon Trunk Line (ACTL) system is now fully operational.

As the world’s newest large-scale carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) facility, the system is built to safely transport and permanently store carbon dioxide.

The Alberta Carbon Trunk Line will shift how carbon is managed in the province. The system captures industrial emissions and delivers the CO2 to mature oil and gas reservoirs in Central Alberta for use in enhanced oil recovery and permanent storage.

The current supply of carbon dioxide is captured at the North West Redwater Partnership (NWR) Sturgeon Refinery and Nutrien’s Redwater Fertilizer Facility, offering a sustainable emissions solution for energy and agriculture sectors.

“The Sturgeon Refinery made a bold decision over 15 years ago to incorporate carbon capture into its design,” said Kerry Margetts, president of the NWR Sturgeon Refinery.

“Our founders believed then, as we are proving today, that carbon capture was our environmental competitive advantage to producing a low carbon intensity diesel from Alberta’s bitumen resources.”

After the carbon dioxide is captured, it travels down a 240-km pipeline, which is owned by Wolf Midstream, to a storage reservoir owned by Enhance Energy.

“This is just the beginning,” said Jeff Pearson, president of Wolf Midstream’s carbon business unit. “This critical piece of infrastructure supports significant future emissions solutions, new utilization pathways and innovation in the carbon capture space. The future of energy and a lower carbon economy relies on key infrastructure like the ACTL.”

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The Alberta Carbon Trunk Line is world’s largest capacity pipeline for carbon dioxide from human activity, capable of transporting up to 14.6 million tonnes of CO2 per year.

This represents about 20 per cent of all current oil sands emissions, or the equivalent of capturing the carbon dioxide from more than 2.6 million cars in Alberta. Designed with excess capacity, the system will connect more facilities and storage reservoirs in the future as demand increases for an effective solution to manage emissions.

Not only does the ACTL system remove greenhouse gas from the atmosphere and decrease Canada’s carbon footprint, it uses the captured carbon dioxide to revitalize a light oil industry. Once the Alberta Carbon Trunk Line transports the carbon dioxide to mature oil fields in Central Alberta, the CO2 is used for enhanced oil recovery before permanent storage.

“This will change how business is done in Alberta,” said Kevin Jabusch, CEO of Enhance Energy, which is injecting CO2 from the ACTL into oil fields near Clive, Alberta.

“We are putting CO2 to use. We permanently keep CO2 out of the environment, while producing low-carbon energy. Not only are we reinvigorating our rural energy economy at a time when it is needed most, but we are playing a key role in advancing a sustainable solution to global energy requirements.”