The North West Redwater (NWR) Partnership’s Sturgeon Refinery is Canada’s first greenfield refinery built since 1984 and the first in the world with an integrated CO2 recovery system. As with all megaprojects, the NWR project was broken up into smaller, more manageable scopes of work. The CO2 recovery system—one of PCL’s scopes—was a vital element of the wider build that benefits Alberta for years to come.

PCL was brought on because of our project development support with NWR and our experience executing on other complex projects that required significant focuses on risk mitigation, execution planning, dependable scheduling and confident budgeting.  PCL planned and managed all aspects of this scope of work, self-performing the mechanical, piping, electrical instrumentation, equipment and CO2 compressor construction with direct-hire craft labour. With a client always looking for schedule improvement opportunities and completion date certainty, PCL brought forward an optimized site execution plan and schedule to successfully deliver a high-quality project that was ready for startup. 

This CO2 recovery system is a core part of one of the largest integrated CO2 capture-transmission-storage systems in the world, and is designed to transmit 1.3 million tonnes of CO2 per year:  the equivalent of removing 280,000 vehicles from the road annually. The CO2 is cooled, dried and compressed by a three-stage centrifugal compressor before the final product is readied for transmission into Alberta’s 240km Carbon Truck Line (ACTL).

PCL provided the client with extensive pre-planning and a robust tailored software solution for managing self-performed construction on site, while our teams worked to de-risk the execution of this scope. The result was a key contribution to a megaproject that put Canada at the forefront of the carbon capture industry and helped pave the way for a modern CO2 carbon capture hub.