Carbon Neutral Data Centres at Affordable Cost: Why Alberta is the Best Place in the World to do it

Ian MacGregor likes to build stuff. He’s an entrepreneur who usually starts from scratch. He likes doing more than talking, he’s an engineer who likes numbers and problems and solving them by building world-scale businesses. He’s done that a few times before. Ian is working on a new business to take CO2 out of the air and make hydrogen. He thinks it will be good for Alberta, Canada and the world. He plans to locate the reference plant in Alberta where he has a few friends from his time building the Sturgeon Refinery and the Alberta Carbon Trunk Line which is now the world’s largest operational system for sequestering manmade CO2. Both of them started with an idea he drew on a napkin. He still has the napkin. He’s got a new napkin. He thinks he can build about 500 of these plants, in Alberta first and then Western Canada and North America. Each plant will take about 250,000 Tonnes of CO2 out of the air and avoid a further 100,000 tonnes of emissions by decarbonizing downstream products using the 10,000 Tonnes of hydrogen the plant will make each year. The plants will use low value and scrap wood as their feedstock, wood that is most often just left behind after harvesting for lumber. The hydrogen is carbon negative because it preserves the work the tree did in taking the CO2 out of the air. He believes he can get the cost of getting CO2 out of the air and safely underground down to $100 US/ tonne. At that price he thinks we can afford it and there will be a few hundred places to do it. Since each plant costs about $300 million that’s a lot of manufacturing jobs and Ian thinks that Edmonton is the place to do it. He believes this will be a new Alberta manufacturing industry, that is about the size of a car business like Ford Canada. The low value wood feedstock is what’s left over after harvesting for lumber, collecting and preparing this feedstock will create lots of jobs in remote communities and for Indigenous peoples. There’s a forest fire angle too, a place to put the thinning’s to protect remote communities from forest fires, a place to put the fuel that is going to have to be removed from the forest floor to reduce the severity of future fires and a place to put the standing dead trees that are left after a fire to improve the speed of the new growth. He has an idea to put the plants at existing sour gas plants around the Province to share under-utilized facilities and extend their lives doing something new because many of them are on their last legs. There are at least 20 places where this should work in Alberta. He’s also looking forward to hearing from all the critics again. They’ve been silent for a while. FOLLOW EDU! ⬇️ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/energydisruptors/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EnergyDisruptor LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/energy-disruptors/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@energydisruptors