Photo: Jeff McIntosh
Before he helped kick off this week’s Clean Energy Congress in Calgary, Murray Birch tried explaining a rather complicated waste-heat recovery project to his mother’s bridge club. “They said I was a good boy,” the president and chief executive of Alliance Pipeline, pictured above, recalled during a press conference held yesterday.
One is tempted to agree with the card enthusiasts. Birch, after all, was speaking about a novel project that could make natural gas compressor stations on the Alliance pipeline system a touch greener at a time when the steel arteries – those that carry oil, anyway – face no shortage of scrutiny.
Conceived in 1994 and commissioned in 2000, the Alliance line solved a bottleneck in natural gas transportation similar to today’s bitumen backlog by opening up a new route for Alberta gas to flow through to Chicago. Industry profits surged as prices rose, while the province – long before the bonanza in U.S. shale – made billions of dollars in improved royalty revenues. Today, the pipeline moves roughly 1.6 billion cubic feet of natural gas south from northern British Columbia and Alberta to Chicago and on to markets in Eastern Canada. ”On any given day, we serve about seven million homes and business with natural gas,” Birch says.
Moving those volumes requires a tremendous amount of power, which is why Alliance uses General Electric jet engines – “just like you’d see on an airplane,” Birch says – to run its fleet of 31,000-to-46,000 horsepower compressor stations. “They’re running flat out every day of the year to move that gas down to Chicago,” he told reporters at the webcast event.
In an effort to make the process more efficient, Alliance, through corporate affiliate NRGreen Power, plans to use GE technology to capture byproduct heat that would otherwise be vented into the atmosphere at a compressor site near Whitecourt, Alberta. The setup will generate 14 megawatts of power. “This is a commercial project like any other. We fully expect to make money,” Birch said.
NRGreen already runs four similar projects in Saskatchewan, but faced hurdles trying to adapt the technology to Alberta’s deregulated electricity market; there is no Alberta equivalent to SaskPower. “That created a bit of an economic hurdle for us,” Birch said. “That makes it more challenging to come up with financing.”
Alberta’s Climate Change Emissions Management Corp. kicked in $7 million to the $54-million project. Birch indicated the Alberta foray into waste-heat recovery might not be the last. “We’d like to do it at every compressor station up and down our line,” he said.
He will have to work quickly. The Alliance system is poised to expand, driven at opposite ends by growth in shale basins in northeast B.C. and the ongoing boom in North Dakota’s Williston fairway, where, Clifford Krauss writes at the New York Times, more than 30 per cent of natural gas produced state-wide is burned as waste.