Empress
During this early period of growth, Dome proposed to build a liquids recovery plant — in effect, a very large straddle plant — at the Empress, Alberta, delivery point to the TransCanada transmission line. The Empress plant sits just inside the Alberta/Saskatchewan border. This is for reasons related to both politics and infrastructure. Politically, Alberta wanted value to be added inside provincial borders. As importantly, it made sense to extract liquids before sending the dry gas that remained - unadulterated methane - into the export market.
During inquiries into natural gas exports in the 1950s, the ERCB recommended the creation of a province-wide natural gas gathering system. The thinking behind this idea was twofold: first, it would be more efficient to develop a single gathering system than to let gathering systems evolve piecemeal. Second, such a system would eliminate the possibility of federal regulation of gas within the province. Alberta was jealous of its hard-won control over natural resources and saw gas transportation within the province as an aspect of resource management. The province was also very conscious of the potential of natural gas and its products for provincial industrial development.
Accordingly, Alberta passed the Alberta Gas Trunk Line Act. Alberta Gas Trunk Line (later known as NOVA Corporation’s Gas Transmission Division) would gather gas within the province, delivering the commodity to federally regulated TransCanada PipeLines and other export pipelines just inside the Alberta border. Empress was the site at which TransCanada PipeLines would receive gas for delivery to eastern markets.
Pacific Petroleums (acquired by Petro-Canada) had already built a straddle plant at Empress to extract liquids, so Dome’s idea was not new. However, Dome built a much larger facility there. The facility was constructed on a patch of bald prairie in the early 1970s. The owners were Dome and a TransCanada subsidiary, which later sold its interest to PanCanadian Petroleums.
The NGLs recovered at the new Empress plant needed to be transported to market, and the largest markets continued to be in the US Midwest. So Dome built injection facilities at nearby Kerrobert, Saskatchewan. Those facilities enabled Dome to inject additional liquids into the batches that were flowing from Fort Saskatchewan through Interprovincial Pipeline.
At the same time the team of Dow Chemicals, Nova and Dome put together the Alberta Ethane Project. This plan was essentially a $1.5 billion blueprint for the creation of a petrochemicals business in Alberta based on natural gas liquids, especially ethane. And the plan took on a political life of its own, since it offered the opportunity for value-added products to be manufactured in Alberta for export. The provincial government stood four-square behind it.
Read more about this topic: History Of The Petroleum Industry In Canada (natural Gas Liquids)
Famous quotes containing the word empress:
“The Empress is Legitimist, my cousin is Republican, Morny is Orleanist, I am a socialist; the only Bonapartist is Persigny, and he is mad.”
—Napoleon Bonaparte III (1808–1873)
“We never really are the adults we pretend to be. We wear the mask and perhaps the clothes and posture of grown-ups, but inside our skin we are never as wise or as sure or as strong as we want to convince ourselves and others we are. We may fool all the rest of the people all of the time, but we never fool our parents. They can see behind the mask of adulthood. To her mommy and daddy, the empress never has on any clothes—and knows it.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)