Moonshine, Henuset Wine, Runnin’ Around Re-tread: Son of CANDU-for-Alberta II, The Sequel
In 2010, CNWC employer Bruce Power bought a startup called Energy Alberta that was pitching what looked like an interesting energy plan for that province. The pitch was to build a 1,200 MW-e Advanced CANDU reactor somewhere in Alberta’s Peace Region, and sell electricity to the provincial grid and industrial process heat to “the oilsands.”
Energy Alberta was co-founded by Wayne Henuset, a Calgary wine and liquor retailer. The other co-founder was Hank Swartout, an oil and gas well driller. The nuclear plan was really just a plan on paper, but what paper it was. Well presented and professional, the startup’s promo literature sparkled with optimism and breezy logic. Who could really argue that displacing 1,200 MW of Alberta’s gas-fired baseload electrical supply, and roughly 2,400 MW of gas-fired process heat, with equivalent amounts of non-emitting supply, would be a good thing?
What was missing was an electric utility that understood the business of selling nuclear power. That’s where BP came in. BP bought the company, i.e., the pitch, i.e., the promo literature, and proceeded to pitch it themselves.
The effort failed. As soon as BP started canvassing the community of Peace River seeking support to locate an ACR-1000 there, anti-nukes mobilized, wheeled in the usual “green” groups like Pembina and Sierra to scare the locals with nonsense about how the plant would poison their water and kill the wildlife.
That’s not what did it in though. Remember we said what was missing was an electric utility that understood the electric power business? Well, what was really missing was an electric utility that understood the power business in Alberta.
Bruce Power unfortunately was not that company. If you’re one of the oilsands majors whose co-located power generation comprises most of Alberta’s baseload electrical supply, there was plenty about the pitch with which to be supremely unimpressed. And, we hate to say because we love our employer, perhaps a bit amused.
The operative word is “co-located.” Most of Alberta’s baseload electrical supply is officially classified as cogeneration. In the province, a cogen plant is a steam plant where steam separates oil from sand and makes electricity for the grid.
And how does an Alberta cogen plant make steam? These days, by burning natural gas. In the case of Suncor’s Base Plant near Fort McMurray, until very recently by burning petroleum coke. Which, when you look at Suncor’s stock prices on the TSX and NYSE, didn’t seem to have much effect on the capital markets. More about that in a minute.
Energy Alberta’s pitch was inchoate, built around a paper reactor—never built, never licensed—that would have been twice as big as the biggest single generator on Alberta’s grid at the time. The paper design envisioned power generation only, but Energy Alberta’s pitch vaguely mused about oilsands process heat as well. In BP’s hands, the plan remained inchoate: locations changed, and it was never settled whether it would have provided electricity only or also process heat, and, most critically, if the latter, how exactly it would provide process heat to a non co-located oilsands operation.
Cut to today, with an early October CBC story about Wayne Henuset’s son Scott, now president of what looks like a re-tread Energy Alberta, pitching a plan to build as many as five CANDU reactors in Peace country, also musing about co-locating them with oilsands. This time the pitch is built around a new CANDU design, the MONARK.
And in early October, the aforementioned Suncor, an oilsands major with co-located power generation classified as cogeneration, began generating much more power from Base Plant than it had previously. For most of its operating life, the power generation side of Base Plant reported at most 43 MW of output, from 50 MW of capacity. On October 10, 2024, its reported capacity jumped to 453, and on November 9 it jumped to 856 MW.
Gas fired.
The problem with nuclear-in-the-oilsands ideas is, nobody in the oilsands seems interested. And there are excellent reasons for that, at least as far as Suncor is concerned. We mentioned that the capital markets have seemed unconcerned that Suncor is an oilsands company. Nor do they seem concerned that Suncor just upped Base Plant’s power generation capacity to 856 MWe, implying a concomitant new process heat capacity three times that—the facility’s CO₂-equivalent emissions will increase in spite of the switch from pet-coke (over 7.7 million tons in 2022, according to Environment Canada’s Large Emitters database) to natural gas. Does this suggest Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) capital market activism had no effect on Suncor’s ability to finance Base Plant expansion? Yes it does.
There are other, non environmental reasons Suncor is disinterested in nuclear energy. We discuss these reasons in the “By the numbers’’ section in the January 2025 Look Ahead edition of the CNWC Newsletter. Any Canadian nuclear utility perhaps mulling over whether to get involved in the new Energy Alberta, and avoid potential “springs to catch woodcocks,’’ might want to give that a read.
Spoiler alert: the main reason is given in the headline on the plot above. But do look at “By the Numbers.”
