A massive new gas pipeline network planned for Alberta is being promoted as a way to decarbonize industry, but the technologies it counts on—carbon capture and “blue” hydrogen production—are still struggling to gain traction.
ATCO Energy Systems’ Yellowhead Mainline project—more than 200 kilometres of high-pressure gas pipelines and related facilities planned to run between Peers, Alberta, and Fort Saskatchewan—went a “major step forward” this month when the company filed its first regulatory application with the Alberta Utilities Commission, reports The Globe and Mail.
The C$2.8-billion project, the company’s largest, is expected to supply 1.1 billion cubic feet of gas per day to the northeast Edmonton area, with operations scheduled to start in 2027.
The gas will feed petrochemical companies, the low-carbon cement sector, and companies making hydrogen products and their derivatives—many of which will be meant to use carbon capture and storage (CCS) to lower greenhouse gas emissions, the Globe writes.
ATCO Chief Operating Officer Wayne Stensby said the project will be “an integral part” of a lower-carbon energy ecosystem.
“If you look at the ultimate use of the natural gas, I think it fits very well into an ever-reducing carbon economy,” he said.
But so far, CCS technologies are found to be expensive alternatives to actual emissions reductions, have not been proven at scale, and have consistently underperformed expectations. The CCS industry itself has admitted the technology falls short of the decarbonization goals it committed to a decade ago.
In May, Edmonton-based Capital Power canceled its C$2.4-billion CCS project, despite previously claiming that “CCS is a technically viable technology,” after determining the project was “not economically feasible.”
ATCO is also pursuing hydrogen producers as customers for its gas.
“What I’m really excited about is seeing the demand for natural gas really coming to fruition,” ATCO CEO Nancy Southern said last spring. “We’re going to need a lot of natural gas for hydrogen in the future, so we’re hoping that that pipe is going to be big enough.”
ATCO plans to serve Dow Chemical’s Path2Zero project, which will expand and retrofit an ethylene plant with CCS to triple production by the decade’s end. Path2Zero will use the gas to produce hydrogen to fuel its ethylene cracker, reports CBC.
Hydrogen is “light, storable, and energy-dense,” the Globe writes, and produces no direct greenhouse gas emissions, making it appealing for decarbonization. However, if natural gas is used to produce it, indirect emissions are created unless CCS is used to make “blue” hydrogen. Even then, researchers warn that hydrogen’s overall emissions can be worse than coal, especially when methane leaks during transportation are considered.
With that in mind, Edmonton’s Energy Transition Climate Resilience Committee recently denounced blue hydrogen as “a marketing play by the fossil fuel industry” and has called on its city to ditch hydrogen as “a poor decarbonization tool.”
