Alberta is expected to see increased investments by petrochemical producers amid prospects of additional feedstock availability and current market condition favoring NGL and ethane extraction costs, a key provincial government official has been reported by Platts.
The province also has a one of the lowest baseline tax jurisdictions in North America and just recently unveiled major changes in the regulatory structure to streamline application processes and reduce timelines for project approvals, he said.
The province is spending time with prospective investors to understand and estimate their feedstock requirements, and other issues. Early this year, the Alberta government set up a "special team" to identify opportunities for building new petrochemical capacity in the province beyond 2014.
Three facilities are planned to be built to tap offgas: an extraction plant at the Horizon oil sands upgrader operated by Canadian Natural Resources near Fort McMurray; a 70 km expansion of the Boreal NGL pipeline; and a debottlenecking of Williams' fractionation plant at Redwater.
The facilities are estimated to cost C$500-600 mln (US$502-603 mln) and the company will start up the facilities in second-quarter 2015 at 11,000-12,000 bpd, with output will be ramped up to 15,000 bpd of ethane, ethylene, propane and propylene by 2017. Nova Chemicals has disclosed a plan to expand its polyethylene production at Joffre, Methanex is planning a debottlenecking of its plant at Medicine Hat, while Dow Chemical has indicated they are looking at more feedstock to expand its 650,000 m tpa polyethylene plant at Fort Saskatchewan."
17-Dec-12 
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