History of The Petroleum Industry in Canada (natural Gas Liquids) - Dome-Amoco Partnership

Dome-Amoco Partnership

Dome had built the other fractionation plant, known as the Edmonton Liquid Gas Plant, in 1962. As Amoco made plans to build liquids as a business, in 1967 the company bought a half interest in this facility. This arrangement was the beginning of a series of liquids-related deals that would soon see Amoco and Dome partnering to become the largest players in Canada’s NGL business.

Another Amoco/Dome joint venture soon followed. At the end of the ‘60s, Alberta and Southern Gas Company began building a larger plant at Cochrane, a small town just west of Calgary. In industry parlance, this was a straddle plant. Another step in the development of the Amoco/Dome liquids system was Dome’s construction — in 1976 — of the Edmonton Ethane Extraction Plant. This straddle plant replaced an earlier facility.

Straddle plants extract ethane and heavier liquids from the gas stream, returning drier gas (by now almost entirely methane) to the pipeline. Liquids fetch a higher price (relative to their energy or BTU content) because they have uses other than firing furnaces — as gasoline additives and petrochemical feedstocks, for example.

While plant construction was underway, Dome and Amoco built a 320-kilometre pipeline from Cochrane to Edmonton (the Co-Ed line), with Dome as operator. This line fed liquids to Dome/Amoco’s new Fort Saskatchewan liquids terminal, and helped the company develop expertise in pipeline operations. Other Dome- and Amoco-operated lines were soon delivering NGLs to the Fort Saskatchewan plant.

Built in the early 1970s, Fort Saskatchewan supplemented the Edmonton Liquid Gas Plant. Key to the plant’s success was the existence underground of large salt formations. The operator was able to dissolve (“wash”) huge storage caverns in these formations. Those caverns provided large volumes of inexpensive, safe inventory capacity for the plant. Having storage capacity for NGLs enabled the company to buy and store surplus NGLs year round, including times when markets were soft and prices dropped to seasonal lows.

The Dome-operated plant quickly became a hub of western Canada’s liquids business. The reason is that Amoco and Dome created a partnership to do something that had never been tried before, anywhere. Using Fort Saskatchewan as a staging point, they batched natural gas liquids through Interprovincial’s oil pipeline to Sarnia. In 1980, the partnership added fractionation facilities at Fort Saskatchewan.

The impact of this arrangement on the economics of transporting large volumes of NGL was considerable. To send propane that distance by rail at the time cost $3.50-$4.20 per barrel. Batching the stuff through Amoco/Dome facilities and IPL brought transportation costs down to approximately $1 per barrel.