Canada's Pieridae plans to capture carbon at Alberta gas facility

Canadian energy company Pieridae Energy plans to capture and sequester carbon at its natural gas processing facility in Caroline, Alberta.

The planned Caroline complex - expected to store up to 3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year in a depleted underground reservoir - is part of a growing effort by energy firms to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to meet increasing customer and government demand for cleaner energy.

Earlier on Thursday, U.S. LNG company Venture Global LNG announced it would capture and sequester carbon in Louisiana in a move to meet new industry environmental, social and governance (ESG) targets.

Pieridae’s complex should help it attract investors for its planned Goldboro LNG export facility in Nova Scotia, which is expecting a final investment decision by June 30. Caroline’s total capacity would be able to offset Goldboro’s emissions.

“Without a concrete, measurable ESG plan nothing is financeable these days,” Pieridae’s chief executive officer Alfred Sorensen said.

Pieridae has delayed its final investment decision on Goldboro several times. Sorensen said the biggest concern now for whether to go ahead with the $10 billion export plant is its construction costs. If confirmed, Goldboro would come online in the first quarter of 2026, he said.

The Caroline complex would be able to remove emissions equivalent to more than 650,000 cars each year at full capacity, based on an average of 4.6 tonnes per year of CO2 per car, Pieridae said. The facility will combine large-scale carbon capture and sequestration and power production, which Pieridae said would make it the largest project of its type in Canada.

It will capture CO2 generated at the gas processing facility, as well as from power production and carbon produced by third parties. The complex’s power production capacity would come to 7.9 billion kilowatt-hours annually.

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