By: Nigel Bankes
Matter Commented On: Alberta’s Standard Form Carbon Sequestration Agreement
PDF Version: Alberta’s Carbon Sequestration Agreement: An Analysis
The Government of Alberta (GoA) has finally released the form or template of the Carbon Sequestration Agreement (CSA) that it will use for carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects organized as hub projects. A hub project is a CCS project in which one party provides transportation and sequestration (T & S) services to variety of emitters. One example is the Atlas Carbon Storage Hub promoted by ATCO EnPower and Shell Canada Products which received its final investment decision in June 2024. Previous ABlawg posts (here, here and here) have reviewed Alberta’s decision to adopt a hub approach to CCS in preference to the vertically integrated project approach that characterized Shell’s earlier Quest project (see ABlawg post here). A vertically integrated CCS project is a project in which a single party (or joint venture) is responsible for all three elements of the CCS value chain (that is to say, capture and compression, transportation, and injection and geological sequestration). In a hub project (or a hub and spoke project) one party (the hub operator) typically offers transportation and sequestration services (T & S) to a number of different large emitters. I refer readers to the earlier posts for the more detailed explanations of the background.