The City of Cold Lake will be sending a letter to the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) about the future of Imperial Oil's application to expand their Cold Lake project.
“According to Imperial's website, the company has been waiting for regulatory approval since early 2016. The process appears to have stalled at the Alberta Energy Regulator when it comes to handling statements of concern. It appears at this point that no statements of concern have been resolved since March 2016,” expressed Andrew Serba, strategic initiatives manager for the City of Cold Lake.
To date, 18 statements of concern have gone unresolved. Over a year ago, the project had 20 statements of concern on file, however two were withdrawn. The city believes this is because the AER failed to handle any of the statements on file.
“I think the biggest issue or concern that we have is there is a growing momentum in the community of a pending announcement this summer. That pending momentum fell to a point of ‘what happened?' There was no announcement, which generated the City of Cold Lake to start to investigate where things are at, because there was a feeling of some excitement for the community and region,” CAO Kevin Nagoya said. “The information that has been provided is of some interest, because it appears that maybe the pending announcement this summer was self-generated on optimism and there really was very little movement on the file.”
What the city should be concerned about, he added, is the possibility for potential investment to move elsewhere outside of the region, province, or country.
Mayor Craig Copeland has been communicating with the AER about the issue.
He said, “These 18 remaining statements of concern, you can't dive into them to see what it's about until a decision has been made. The Alberta Energy Regulator can't move on the file and say yay or nay to the big Imperial project until these 18 things are dealt with. It seems to be taking a long time for the 18 to be decided. We have to move on with the $1-billion or $2-billion worth of project here, we're just sitting in limbo.”
Copeland continued the benefit this project would have on the community is huge.
According to the city, the expansion would require about 500 people, and could take anywhere from three to four years.
“I think it would be wise of us to write to the two ministers and even the premier, just to capture the fact that this community is frustrated and we need to move on,” Copeland noted.
Currently, Imperial Oil Cold Lake is producing over 160,000 barrels of oil per day.
Using new technology created through the expansion, they would be able to increase their production by 50,000 barrels of bitumen per day and reduce the amount of water used.
“I think it would be wise for us to show some support in terms of Imperial Oil and try to get this moving,” Copeland expressed.
