N Canada indigenous group advances small-scale LNG
The Inuvialuit Petroleum Corporation (IPC) on March 10 filed an application with the Canada Energy Regulator (CER) for its C$100mn (US$79.2mn) Inuvialuit Energy Security Project (IESP) that would reactivate an existing natural gas well in Canada’s Far North to feed a small-scale liquefaction and gas-to-liquid facility.
The application was filed with the CER on March 10, but not posted to the regulator’s website until March 17.
Developed in partnership with Ferus Natural Gas Fuels, the IESP represents a return to natural gas development in Canada’s Mackenzie Delta, more than 2,000 km north of the Canada-US border. A flurry of exploration drilling in the Delta from the late 1980s to the early 2000s discovered an estimated 10 trillion ft3 of natural gas reserves; the IESP will tap a single well, TUK M-18, drilled in 2002 into an estimated 278bn ft3 of recoverable reserves.
NGW first wrote about the project in the latest edition of the International Gas Union’s Global Voice of Gas. The government of the Northwest Territories has its own LNG aspirations, ranging from small-scale projects like IESP to larger barge-based floating LNG export facilities in the Beaufort Sea.
The IESP received approval from the Inuvialuit government’s Environmental Impact Screening Committee (EISC) earlier this year. Pending approval from the CER, it will be developed on the site of TUK M-18, 16 km south of Tuktoyaktuk, a hamlet of about 900 people on the shores of the Beaufort Sea 350 km north of the Arctic Circle and the most northerly community in mainland Canada.
Under the IESP, Ferus and the IPC will reactivate TUK M-18 and install a pre-fabricated energy centre consisting of small scale liquefaction and gas-to-liquids modules.
The energy centre would produce LNG, propane and synthetic diesel that would then be trucked to local power, heating and transportation customers – including to a proposed gas-fired power generating station in the hamlet of Tuktoyaktuk, which now gets its electricity from diesel generating facilities, and to the gas utility serving the heating needs of Inuvik.
The M-18 well is expected to be productive for more than 50 years at rates ranging between 57,000 m3 (2mn ft3)/day and 170,000 m3 (6mn ft3)/day, depending on demand, IPC says in its application to the CER.
Assuming receipt of approvals from the CER and other government agencies in the Northwest Territories, followed by a final investment decision, in Q3 2021, module fabrication in Alberta would begin in Q3 2021 for shipment to the site in Q3 2022. The facility would be commissioned in Q4 2022 and first gas would be expected in Q1 2023.