Progressing decarbonized energy in Western Canada

AJ McCoy has taken a new role with us as our Western Canada Future Energy Leader. AJ has held various roles to date at GHD and has been involved in Renewable Natural Gas (RNG) and Hydrogen infrastructure due diligence, permitting, design, and construction throughout his career. He will now lead the Future Energy team in their goals to decarbonize the energy sector in Western Canada through work on energy renewable projects with a focus on originating projects with industry.

One of AJs priorities with the GHD future energy team is to help industry and municipalities in Western Canada navigate towards a sustainable energy future. “Several Canadian municipalities have already declared climate emergencies, and we are invested in helping them,” AJ says. Many municipalities are looking to reach net-zero in the next 10 years, as different provinces and cities have a different political focus when it comes to their energy goals.

AJ underscores the importance in having discussions with oil and gas companies about how to decarbonize their products and how they can implement an overall strategy that identifies projects that suit their needs, budget and situational criteria. The strategy can also help them explore production and offtake scenarios. “We help owners make economical sense of their goals and not just for the sake of decarbonization, but also to help them generate revenue. We must decarbonize, and in fact, we can do so by increasing profitability,” he says.

For this reason, we are dedicated to helping companies develop projects that achieve their overall sustainability goals and help them determine which projects are most feasible for them. This cannot be a one-size-fits-all approach.

We are seeing investments made in key technologies and studies, and we are supporting businesses and governments in assessing the feasibility and profitability of these technologies, providing public consultation and education, helping secure environmental approvals and funding streams, and eventually assisting with front-end engineering design as these projects progress. Some of the areas we are supporting include:

• Renewable Natural Gas (RNG), Hydrogen and Carbon Capture Utilization and Storage (CCUS)
• Biogas and biosolids management, and studies for procurement and use of water for green/blue hydrogen
• Environmental approvals, funding applications and stakeholder engagement for capital projects
• Power, renewables and energy systems integration

A tailored approach based on geographical, economical, funding, and political factors comes into play and figuring out solutions that take these factors into consideration is the foundation to help identify areas to decarbonize. Below are some of the factors to consider based on technology and geography:

Alberta is one of the largest producers of hydrogen energy in the world, ultimately releasing grey hydrogen carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. We are working with oil and gas to capture emissions through carbon capture utilization and storage (CCUS). One potential opportunity is to use microsites with solar and wind energy technologies and use strategies that optimize curtailed generation times to generate green hydrogen. Our team is working with pumped hydrogen and wind /solar to curtail hydrogen use for non-peak hours.

Given the strength of the agriculture sector in this area, it’s no surprise we are seeing feedlot operators develop facilities that will create biogas through anaerobic digestion, processing agricultural materials to recover the energy that would otherwise be lost. Large projects like this are becoming increasingly-important in the agricultural space because it’s one of the few industries where you can use RNG from agri-waste to contribute to a negative carbon intensity score. Off-takers are placing capital to help these projects, and to offtake the RNG with the environmental commodity used to decarbonize their grids.

We are seeing more and more hydrogen blending studies and green electrolysis projects in BC. This is occurring due to the less carbon intensive nature of the electricity produced there. Since BC uses hydroelectricity, it’s a great fit for green hydrogen. There are several hydrogen projects moving into detailed design phases and as the processes for implementing these projects are solidified, we can expect to see additional similar projects taking shape with utilities in this region, either for domestic use of the hydrogen or potentially even for hydrogen export across the Pacific.

The RNG focus in BC is expanding in utilization of organic waste. RNG from woody biomass generates 10 times the production received from standard organics like food waste or manure. BC is lucky to have many large logging pulp and paper mills, which means that tonnes of this type of waste is readily available.

About GHD

GHD is a leading professional services company operating in the global markets of water, energy and resources, environment, property and buildings, and transportation. Committed to a vision to make water, energy, and communities sustainable for generations to come, GHD delivers advisory, digital, engineering, architecture, environmental and construction solutions to public and private sector clients. Established in 1928 and privately owned by its people, GHD’s network of 12,000+ professionals is connected across 160 offices located on five continents.