Last month, Premier Danielle Smith posted to LinkedIn about a meeting she had with the ‘Energy Alberta’ group, which “met today to discuss establishing nuclear power, backed with the right expertise.” If you follow my social media and Op-Ed activities, you will know that I am a hard core Canadian nuclear energy advocate. So needless to say, this post from Premier Smith got me excited and I wanted to know more about this ‘Energy Alberta’ group.As this same post was reposted by Environment Minister Rebecca Schultz, I followed up with her Press Secretary Ryan Fournier (no relation) who informed me that ‘Energy Alberta’ was under Brian Jean’s Ministry of Energy and Minerals.Unfortunately, any attempt to obtain clarity on who ‘Energy Alberta’ group is and what their mandate includes, from Minister Brian Jean’s office, has failed to produce a response.Before I run with what I suspect or hope is going on at a senior UCP ministerial level, it is important to note that nuclear energy is a shared mandate by both Brian Jean and Nathan Neudorf, Minister of Utilities and Affordability.The fact that the ‘Energy Alberta’ group is under Brian Jean, suggests that this group’s mandate may be biased towards hydrocarbons over a pure play on electricity generation, which would be under Nathan Neudorf.In the absence of data, imagination and speculation run wild..Sixteen years ago I was working on a top secret environmental impact assessment (EIA) for an in-situ bitumen production pilot project located north of Wabasca-Desmarais, a small hamlet located 126 km north of Lesser Slave Lake Alberta. This community of approximately 4,000 residents is home to the Bigstone Cree Nation and Woodland Cree spread out across numerous regional reservations.As a junior environmental scientist, what thrilled me the most of this project was the knowledge that this thermal bitumen production pilot was slated to make use of a technology called electro-resistive heating (ERH) and the electrical energy was slated to come from a yet to be built large nuclear power plant.As the name implies, ERH uses electrical heaters instead of steam injection, to mobilize bitumen for production, much like is done today with natural gas fired steam assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) projects in the Athabasca oil sands region. The hearsay in my consultancy firm, was that the EIA client for this Wabasca-Desmarais pilot project was Shell Canada. This was confirmed later to be true.Note that the bifocal optics on the Shell ERH Wabasca-Desmarais pilot project includes two parallel developments within the Peace River region during the first ten years of the 2000s.The first was the legacy ‘Energy Alberta’ Corporation (EAC) that engaged in six-plus years of stakeholder public relations in the Peace River region to build a large Canada CANDU nuclear power facility near Lac Cardinal, 30 km from Peace River. Note that EAC is owned by Ontario’s Bruce Power, which is Canada’s largest nuclear power company. While the EAC alluded to oil sands producers as the targeted market, they never mentioned Shell Canada specifically.The second was Shell Canada’s highly successful large scale Peace River in-situ upgrading (IUP) research using its patented ERH technologies to convert bitumen, while still underground, into higher value light crude oil (i.e., API Gravity 30 to 49). When Shell Canada spent $500 million in rights to land within the Wabasca-Desmarais region in 2006, it was believed to be motivated by the positive results from its Peace River IUP research.Specifically, this acquisition was viewed as evidence that Shell thought that its IUP process could be used to upgrade and recover light oil produced using its ERH technologies from Alberta’s massive 400 billion barrel Grossmont bitumen resource located north of Wabasca-Desmarais.Note that Alberta’s bitumen reserve of 165 billion barrels does not include the oil-in-place within the Grossmont, as historically conventional SAGD in-situ production technologies have failed to economically recover bitumen from this geologically unique formation.If Grossmont bitumen could be shown to be economically recoverable, Alberta’s bitumen reserves could double overnight, making Alberta’s oil reserve as large or larger than those of Saudi Arabia or Venezuela.Unfortunately, Bruce Power pulled the plug in 2011 on the EAC’s Peace River nuclear power plans and to the best of my knowledge, Shell Canada did not proceed with its IUP pilot project near Wabasca-Desmarais.Factors that may have played into these decisions include the 2008 Great Recession and the rapid growth of horizontal drilling — hydraulic fracturing that crushed natural gas prices in the decade that followed. Low natural gas prices means cheap steam for in-situ bitumen production using SAGD technologies.However, the world has remarkably changed since 2011, a case in point is Canada’s 2023 pledge to triple its nuclear power fleet and to achieve a Net Zero state by 2050.Meanwhile, here in Alberta, Premier Smith is pledging to double oil & gas production, while advocating for a 2050 Net Zero status as a province at a time in history that our grid is increasingly flirting with blackout conditions as more intermittent wind and solar are being added to the power pool. As an energy scientist, I suspect that this trifecta of opposing forces in Alberta can be remedied through a regulatory framework geared to facilitate a hybrid mandate for large nuclear power plants.This hybrid role would have large nuclear power plants diverting power to produce oil from an IUP-like process when hourly electricity rates and demand is low, while acting as a backstop for the grid when Alberta’s large wind and solar facilities fail during periods of peak winter and summer demand.This hybrid utility would simply flip a switch and electricity would be directed to wherever the demand (margins) is the highest.As nuclear is emission-less, any oil produced through nuclear energy would not conflict with the push to reduce oil and gas emissions.Am I wishfully thinking? Only time will tell.
