An oilsands facility is reflected in a tailings pond near Fort McMurray, Alta., on July 10, 2012. The newly named Oil Sands Alliance has always had a much broader focus than just carbon capture, said president Kendall Dilling.Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press
The Pathways Alliance, a group of oil sands companies targeting net-zero production by 2025, is changing its name in what it says is a bid to better reflect its actual work of promoting and expanding the oil-sands industry.
It will now be called the Oil Sands Alliance.
Kendall Dilling, its president, said in an interview Friday that although the bulk of the work done by the group has been on the carbon-capture project, known as Pathways, it has always had a much broader focus.
“From day one, we’ve been the full-service industry association for oil sands,” Mr. Dilling said. For example, Pathways works in various environmental spaces in the sector, such as air and water protection and preserving biodiversity, as well as land-use planning and reclamation.
“We incubated everything under the single Pathways banner for a long time,” he said, but it has gotten to the point where stakeholders are getting confused because everybody associates Pathways only with the carbon-capture project that is at the heart of the group’s emissions-reduction plan.
The carbon capture and storage (CCS) initiative is a 400-kilometre pipeline that would transport carbon trapped at oil-sands facilities to an underground hub near Cold Lake, Alta., with the aim of reducing emissions by 22 megatonnes a year.
Talks to capture oil sands industry’s emissions in Alberta gather momentum
Prime Minister Mark Carney has said that reducing emissions from Alberta’s oil sands, including progress on the project, would be a “necessary condition” to approving any new pipeline to Canada’s coasts to access export markets.
An energy agreement signed by Ottawa and Alberta in November laid out a plan to have the Pathways Project built by 2040 to achieve emissions reductions at date-specific intervals.
Now that the project has advanced “to a certain point of maturity,” it needs to have its own separate identity, Mr. Dilling said.
Yet it is far from being done. Work is currently at the technical and engineering design phase, and it is gradually filing regulatory applications and undergoing consultation.
The project’s exact fiscal framework also remains up in the air.
Mr. Dilling would not comment on whether oil-sands companies that are members of the alliance have made any firm financial commitments, citing confidentiality.
But he said Oil Sands Alliance is in active discussions with the federal and Alberta governments, and the three parties are “at the table working really hard to get to yes; everybody wants this project to happen.”
Ottawa ties stalled carbon-capture project to new pipeline
That doesn’t mean just the CCS project – it includes increasing oil-sands production and expanding access to overseas markets with a new pipeline, he said.
“That’s really what we’re collectively trying to solve. It’s a massive national interest project” that could move the economic needle for Canada, Mr. Dilling said.
“If we do Pathways, and you build a new pipeline, and you add million barrels a day of production to fill it, that is massive. That’s north of $100-billion in capital investment and the associated jobs and supply chain,” he said.
“This is, in my humble opinion, the national interest project. There’s really nothing that touches that scope.”
The Ottawa-Alberta memorandum of understanding included a clause that the two jurisdictions would work co-operatively with Pathways partner companies “to develop and enter into a tri-lateral MOU on or before April 1, 2026 for a multi-phased approach to delivering a set of emissions savings projects,” focused mainly on the CCS project and solvent-based production to reduce emissions.
It said the first phase of the projects would be “built and commence operations in a staged manner between 2027 and 2040.”
Asked whether the CCS project will meet the timeline set out in the MOU, Mr. Dilling said while there is “a lot of talk about April 1, from an industry perspective, we’re just heads down, working with urgency.”
There is “nothing magic about April 1 for us,” he added.
“This work will be ongoing for much, much longer after that, just given the scope and scale of the project. So for us, that feels like another interim milestone.”