Las Vegas, NV - An industrialist at the helm of an $8.5-billion carbon-capture project and oil refinery, currently under construction, has challenged Boilermakers to win the public relations battle over the future of oil in Canada.

"There needs to be broad education" on carbon capture, said Ian MacGregor, chairman of a consortium that is building the first new oil refinery in Alberta since the 1980s. "No one knows anything about it. They need to understand what can be done.

"And finally, we have to mobilize people. You are the logical leaders, because you're on every project. You've got the most to lose - and you're organized."

MacGregor was speaking to delegates at the Boilermakers' 33rd Consolidated Convention.

The newest carbon-capture technology, currently being built by hundreds of Boilermakers at the Sturgeon Refinery in Alberta, will allow Canada to meet its share of the world's global-warming targets, which seek to limit average temperature increases.

Pays for itself

The technology, which uses carbon dioxide from the refining process to help extract more oil from existing fields, will pay for itself as the oil is sold, MacGregor said. The technology will make Canadian oil from the oil sands 30% cleaner than the much lighter product from Texas, he said.

The recaptured carbon dioxide is pumped into shale formations to expand in-ground oil that could not previously be accessed. The expansion makes it easier to extract the crude.

"I thought we could produce reliable, low-carbon energy from oil," he said. "I thought all about windmills and solar panels and that stuff. When I went into the numbers, I don't think they're as robust as everybody thinks they are. They all need backup capacity of some form and that's probably coming from a coal plant or a gas-fired power plant.

"So I had this idea. We've got lots of oil in Alberta. Put it into a refinery, make it into [high-grade] diesel fuel, take the CO2 that comes out of the refining process and use it for enhanced oil recovery."

The shale in which the carbon is stored has been around for 30 million years, said MacGregor.

Tested by Mother Nature

"The places we're putting the CO2 have been there for 30 million years under pressure. So these reservoirs, we know they're going to be pressure containers because Mother Nature has been testing them for 30 million years," he said.

Canada is a world leader in carbon-capture, with two facilities operating in Saskatchewan and Alberta and the huge Sturgeon project under construction. While the Saskatchewan project, the first of its size on the planet, experienced some initial problems, it is now operating as designed, MacGregor said.

The Sturgeon project is being built in three phases, with a total investment of $25.5 billion planned. Dean Milton, Business Manager-Secretary Treasurer of Boilermakers Local 146, says the project will create thousands of jobs over a 30-year period.

Displaying pictures of a wind farm and an oil refinery side by side, MacGregor said the wind farms would give us unreliable technology for which we would all pay. But the oil refinery, while not photogenic, would generate thousands of jobs every year for decades and have an equally positive environmental impact.