Canadian Methanol Proponent in CCS Deal

Nauticol Energy, which is developing a world-scale methanol manufacturing facility in Alberta, and Enhance Energy, which recently reached a carbon sequestration milestone in the same province, said March 23 they would collaborate to capture and sequester up to 1mn mt/yr of CO₂ from Nauticol’s blue methanol plant.

In 2018, Nauticol announced plans to build a methanol manufacturing plant near Grande Prairie, in northwestern Alberta. Earlier this month, it joined forces with Singapore’s Fortrec to develop, build and operate that plant to produce 3mn mt/yr of net-zero blue methanol and distribute C$1bn (US$800mn) worth of blue methanol to global markets.

Nauticol’s alliance with Enhance Energy, a partner in a CO₂ pipeline which recently delivered its millionth mt of CO₂ for sequestration in central Alberta, will accelerate the development of the blue methanol plant, expected to be operational by 2025.

“Our plant design was already targeted to be a global leader in low emissions,” Nauticol CEO Mark Tonner said. “Partnering with Enhance on CO₂ capture and sequestration changes the game of what low carbon methanol production at world scale will be from this point on”.

For Enhance, the partnership with Nauticol is a catalyst to develop its second world-scale carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) project in Alberta. In early March, the Alberta Carbon Trunk Line (ACTL), founded by Enhance more than a decade ago and now owned by Wolf Midstream, marked the cumulative delivery of 1mn mt of CO₂ from point sources near Edmonton to enhanced oil recovery operations in central Alberta.

“At Enhance we are immensely proud of the strides we are making to reduce emissions through CO₂ capture and sequestration,” Enhance CEO Kevin Jabusch said. “Our partnership with Nauticol is another opportunity to enable scalable decarbonisation across the economy and help reduce Alberta’s carbon footprint.”

The Nauticol-Enhance CCS project will be the third major CCS project in Alberta, following on from the ACTL sequestration project and Anglo-Dutch major Shell’s Quest CCS project, which has sequestered more than 5mn mt of CO₂ since 2015.

Nauticol will be responsible for capturing waste CO₂ from methanol produced from natural gas at the Grande Prairie plant, while Enhance will manage the development, construction and operation of the CO₂ sequestration system beyond the plant site.

The Nauticol-Fortrec joint venture, finally, will market and distribute Nauticol’s blue methanol from Singapore, the world’s largest marine fuelling terminal.

“Recent announcements from Maersk and others have reinforced our conviction that blue methanol will play an important role to cost-effectively lower marine emissions in the near term and that rapidly developing technology positions methanol as a zero-carbon hydrogen fuel of the future,” Tonner said.