Canada's largest carbon storage hub breaks ground near Clive, Alberta declares race with U.S.

Enhance Energy Inc. broke ground Wednesday on the Origins carbon capture and storage hub near Clive, central Alberta, with Alberta's energy minister framing the project as part of a competitive race with the United States.

Origins will have capacity to permanently store up to 1.5 million tonnes of CO2 per year—the equivalent of taking over 500,000 cars off the road annually. Operations are set to begin in January 2027. The facility is Canada's largest carbon storage project to date.

"I watched the United States doing something very similar, and we are in a race, and we need to win that race," Brian Jean, Alberta's minister of energy and minerals, said at the groundbreaking ceremony Wednesday.

Jean tied the project to Alberta's goal to double oil production to eight million barrels a day, a target Premier Danielle Smith has said could take 10 to 15 years. "If we are going to do what we think we're gonna do and double production, we can't do it without CCUS," Jean said—referring to carbon capture, utilization and storage.

Sixty-five people are working on a pipeline to carry CO2 to the hub in Clive, built from Canadian steel manufactured in Saskatchewan and rolled in Alberta. The pipeline is designed for multiple users and connects into Alberta's CO2 transportation backbone.

Enhance Energy has been putting CO2 underground at Clive since 2020 using enhanced oil recovery—injecting carbon to extract oil from reservoirs that stopped producing decades ago. Origins works differently: CO2 goes into deep saltwater formations and stays there permanently. The hub will be fed by the Alberta Carbon Trunk Line, one of the largest CO2 pipelines in the world, which gathers carbon from industrial plants north of Edmonton.

Federal Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Tim Hodgson attended the ceremony. When asked about economics given Alberta carbon credits are trading at a fraction of the province's compliance price, Hodgson said the federal-provincial memorandum of understanding was designed to "create a functioning carbon market, and that's what we're doing."

The ceremony took place on Treaty 6 territory. Lacey Yellowbird, executive director of Maskwacis Employment Centre and member of Samson Cree Nation in Maskwacis, gave the land acknowledgement.