Economic corridors and building the hydrogen economy stood out as local topics of interest for Lloydminster-Vermilion-Wainwright MLA Garth Rowswell at the Pacific NorthWest Economic Region (PNWER) summit in Whistler B.C.
Rowswell joined 500 state, provincial, and territorial legislators, government officials, and business leaders from the Pacific Northwest states and Western Canada at the summit July 21-25.
“The part of the agenda that we (Alberta) had the biggest influence on, was working on economic corridors,” said Rowswell from his home on July 28.
“We’re really pushing the one from Alberta to Alaska. Alaska wants to pass some legislation that would allow for an economic corridor to be considered. It’s a step-by-step we’ve got to go through to get this done.”
Alberta recently re-signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the prairie provinces and also added the Northwest Territories to work together on transportation and other economic partnerships to “enhance Alberta’s access to the Arctic.”
Rowsell says an Alberta to Alaska corridor would be for everything such as fibre optics and pipelines.
“It will be a long time to get it finished, but we’re headed in the right direction on it,” he said.
“So I think that will be of interest locally. We’re doing a lot of work on economic corridors all over the province.”
Rowswell says a new bi-provincial plan with Saskatchewan to add passing lanes on Highway 17 north of Lloydminster, announced in July, is part of building Alberta’s economic corridors.
“We’re fixing up Hwy 14 from the Saskatchewan border to Wainwright this year and we’ll go a little further to Edmonton next year,” he said.
He says Hwy 41 is another potential corridor to expand north from the Canada/U.S. border.
“If we can go from the Wild Horse border crossing and go all the way up to Fort McMurray, that can all become part of an economic corridor from Texas all the way to Alaska,” explained Rowswell.
“These are long-term projects that you have to advocate for.”
The summit agenda included hydrogen and news British Columbia and Washington state are working on first-of-its kind study on how they can develop the hydrogen economy in their jurisdictions.
Rowswell says Oregon is also interested in hydrogen, but he notes all three PNWER jurisdictions are far behind Alberta.
“We produce 2 million tonnes of hydrogen a year right now. The way we make it is just about the cheapest in the world,” he said.
Rowswell says PNWER delegates toured two energy technology companies in Squamish including Quantum Technology that invented a process to create a hydrogen and helium liquefaction system.
He says they learned what customers that sell ammonia would need to do to crack the hydrogen off that and the challenges of doing that economically.
“They want to make it from water hydrolysis and we’re making it from natural gas. Their way of doing it is at least three times as expensive as what we’re doing to it,” said Rowswell.
He’s notes because it’s difficult to build any new pipelines in Canada, Alberta is planning to ship hydrogen as ammonia or methanol to customers who will need a cracker that will take hydrogen out of the ammonia.
“That’s how we’re going to develop our market,” said Rowswell.
The MLA also took a same-day tour of a company called Carbon Engineering which is a direct air carbon capture research facility.
In a nutshell, he said, “they suck in air and suck carbon dioxide out of it,” but it’s expensive to do.
He says it costs about $400-600 a tonne to capture it that way as opposed to taking it out of a natural gas burning unit.
Read More: Rowswell helps paint Alberta blue
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