Western Standard - June 13, 2024


Going global in Newfoundland

Topics
Triple Point Resources hydrogen project in Newfoundland salt caverns hydrogen storage salt dome hydrogen project recruitment
Guests
Julie Lemieux
Mentioned
Atlas Salt Newfoundlander
CMS： Live from the floor of the Global Energy Show ‘The Missing Tax Report’

Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

155.03

Word count

1,673

Sentence count

112

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we talk to Julie Lemieux, CEO of Triple Point Resources, about their hydrogen storage project in Newfoundland and Labrador. Triple Point has the mineral rights to a salt dome on the West Coast of Newfoundland, which is a unique geological feature that can be used to store hydrogen.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hi, we're here with Julie Lemieux, CEO of Triple Point Resources, who's got a very interesting hydrogen play going on in Newfoundland.
00:00:11.680 Yes, so Triple Point has the mineral right of a salt dome.
00:00:16.520 Salt domes are a very unique geological feature, and there's no salt dome right now that are proven to store hydrogen,
00:00:23.660 but we do have one out there, and there's a lot of wind farms that are coming on the island.
00:00:30.280 And they will need storage, so having this asset will really help all the proponents to be more efficient,
00:00:38.560 to ship hydrogen to Europe, and really make a Canadian of a reality. 0.52
00:00:46.420 That's really interesting, because there's different ways of generating hydrogen, and one of the ways is electrolysis through seawater, right?
00:00:53.420 Yes.
00:00:54.580 Compared to, say, here in Alberta, where we are taking it from ammonia and natural gas.
00:01:01.280 So, what are the timelines for your project, and when do you think it will be coming on stream?
00:01:07.780 Well, with this type of project in the hydrogen sector, in Newfoundland, there's not a lot of rules and regulations for underground storage.
00:01:18.500 So, right now, we're working with the government to make sure that we'll be able to permit the project.
00:01:23.840 We believe, if everything was to go well, between three and five years, we can be operational, but it will take, you know, the time it takes to go through the environmental assessment.
00:01:33.720 We believe we will have the funding in place very soon.
00:01:37.540 But, yeah, I would say three to five years.
00:01:39.040 So, is the South Dome offshore or onshore?
00:01:43.220 The South Dome is onshore, so it's perfectly located 10 kilometers from shore, right beside the Trans-Canada Highway.
00:01:51.520 The power line is crossing the property as well, and the GH2, one of the big projects that is there for wind, they are roughly 30 kilometers away,
00:02:01.980 and they have one of their faces adjacent to the Dome as well, and there's four other proponents that are pushing through multi-billion dollar wind farms, wind project in Newfoundland.
00:02:13.680 So, how is the hydrogen transported?
00:02:16.920 Does it come through a pipeline?
00:02:18.300 Does it convert it into ammonia?
00:02:20.120 So, each of the projects in Newfoundland that want to produce hydrogen, they will produce it on site where they are located.
00:02:27.680 It's really the excess that would come to the Dome through the power line.
00:02:31.980 That's how we see it for now.
00:02:35.660 But the most important, where we are really there to enable all those projects, to provide them a constant power supply.
00:02:44.800 So, our first phase will be to provide power through a compressor project using salt cavern.
00:02:51.520 So, we'll act like a big battery or a pacemaker for the grid.
00:02:54.760 So, instead of having their equipment going for 60% of the time, we hope to bring that number up.
00:03:00.120 So, they will be more efficient, be able to electrolyze more on site and make sure that their electrolyzer are not turning on and off.
00:03:08.040 Like, it's well known that electrolyzer, they don't like to go on and off.
00:03:12.040 Same thing with the ammonia reactor.
00:03:14.060 But for us, we're really focusing on the midstream part, like the storage aspect of all the access.
00:03:19.900 And then from there, we can store the hydrogen.
00:03:24.320 And we decide to either, let's say, use it on site to create more power for the grid.
00:03:30.200 Or, at one point, most likely, we'll have a pipeline that will go from the dome to one of the port that is not too far from the asset.
00:03:40.060 Oh, that's interesting.
00:03:41.780 And are you based here in Calgary?
00:03:44.220 Yes, I am based here in Calgary.
00:03:47.180 Most of the team is here.
00:03:48.520 But we have also an office in St. John's, and we'll open an office closer to where the project is on the west coast of Newfoundland.
00:03:58.780 And we'll be able to showcase more the official salt dome to different localities that are closer to the dome.
00:04:06.920 And we started our engagement process locally and our environmental.
00:04:11.140 So, all that will, you know, like, we'll need to be there on site more often.
00:04:17.660 So, that's why we'll have an office there.
00:04:19.500 But we are, most of the team is here in Calgary.
00:04:22.760 Excellent.
00:04:23.220 So, what has the response been here at the show to some of the things that you're doing?
00:04:28.520 Obviously, Alberta is moving along with its own hydrogen plans.
00:04:32.640 The premier is just upstairs talking about it at lunch today.
00:04:35.780 So, how do you think it all fits in in a national framework?
00:04:40.140 I think on the national side, like, to have a salt dome on the west coast of not just Canada, but North America, it's something that's very unique.
00:04:50.100 There's no other salt deposits that are that size in Canada or in the United States.
00:04:58.120 So, at one point in the ecosystem that we need to develop the hydrogen sector, this asset will be developed for more and more storage.
00:05:06.920 It will be a multi-generational asset for the hydrogen sector.
00:05:13.420 And we were happy that for us, when we took over this asset, they didn't decide to mine it for a road salt or do anything else.
00:05:21.760 It's like, it's a dome that's never been developed, so it's going to be prime for clean energy.
00:05:27.260 So, compressed air and hydrogen is something we really want to do and will help us, help the country really to have a bigger export capacity and really match our engagement with Germany, as an example,
00:05:44.980 where we, you know, we promised them we're going to ship a lot of hydrogen, how we're going to do that.
00:05:50.140 Without storage, it's going to be very difficult to happen, even if there's a lot of wind in Atlantic Canada and all the provinces.
00:05:57.380 Sure.
00:05:57.620 Listeners in Alberta might know, but maybe not in the rest of the country, salt oils are normally associated with oil and gas in the Gulf of Mexico.
00:06:08.560 You know, the oil and gas is normally under the planks, right?
00:06:11.620 Yep.
00:06:11.800 So, it's kind of interesting that you're taking kind of almost like some oil play and turning it into...
00:06:19.040 Exactly.
00:06:19.740 I think it's really where the renewable industry will really close the gap with the oil and gas industry.
00:06:28.420 Like the oil and gas industry have developed fantastic, exceptional assets to manage the oil and gas network.
00:06:41.100 Salt caverns is something that is very well known, it's been used for more than 60 years in the oil and gas.
00:06:46.640 Hydrogen caverns have been there since the early 70s as well.
00:06:51.120 It's not just something that we were pushing through.
00:06:54.400 But now I think with the renewable picking up speed, they will need the same type of storage that the oil and gas have created for now, like decades.
00:07:05.680 So, it's just one of the tools that the oil and gas will bring to the hydrogen sector.
00:07:10.880 So, I think it's a great way to bridge the gap and bring people over from the oil and gas industry into the hydrogen sector.
00:07:19.060 It's a very, very similar way of managing the potential of the hydrogen.
00:07:24.400 Excellent.
00:07:25.000 So, how long has the company been encountered?
00:07:26.980 How long has it been helped last?
00:07:28.600 The company was formed just two years ago.
00:07:31.340 It was a spin-out of Atlas Salt.
00:07:33.700 Atlas Salt is a company from Newfoundland that wants to develop a salt mine for road salt.
00:07:41.120 It's probably 10, 15 kilometers away from the dome.
00:07:43.720 And this asset was part of their portfolio.
00:07:47.620 But now that they're focusing on the salt mine for road salt, they didn't have the bandwidth to really focus on that salt dome.
00:07:55.240 So, I was brought in to really push and see how we're going to develop this asset into the hydrogen economy.
00:08:02.860 And so, they can stay focused on the salt mine.
00:08:05.520 We'll stay focused on developing the dome.
00:08:08.020 So, what was the attraction of Calgary?
00:08:10.020 What does Calgary offer?
00:08:12.540 A triple point that, say, you can't find in Montreal other than a good restaurant.
00:08:17.340 There's nothing you cannot find in Montreal, in a way.
00:08:21.100 But I was here.
00:08:24.360 You know, the energy sector is in Calgary.
00:08:28.900 And because it's so close to the oil and gas industry, salt cavern experts are here in Calgary or in Houston or closer to the oil and gas.
00:08:39.460 So, it was easier for us to be here, try to recruit as many Newfoundlanders as possible that are in the oil and gas industry, that are from Newfoundland.
00:08:50.160 There is a lot of them.
00:08:51.500 And we're very happy that we were able to recruit some of them and slowly we'll have more.
00:08:58.320 Expertise in salt cavern is very unique.
00:09:01.480 And there is Newfoundlander, I'm sure, somewhere here in Calgary that we'll be able to find.
00:09:07.280 And frankly, like, the people that decide to come and be with us, they couldn't believe that there was a salt dome in Newfoundland.
00:09:17.740 There's no salt dome in Canada.
00:09:20.700 You know, maybe we'll find more at one point.
00:09:23.040 But right now, we have bedded salts in, I think, in BC, in Alberta, in Saskatchewan, in Ontario.
00:09:30.780 Those are very small caverns.
00:09:32.280 So, having a salt dome is something very unique that will allow you to build way bigger caverns, like four, five, five, six, seven times the size of the cavern we have here, just with one cavern.
00:09:44.560 So, there's a lot of people that want to be part of this project that is very unique.
00:09:49.580 Excellent.
00:09:50.180 Is this your first energy show, global energy show?
00:09:53.100 No, I was coming, like, I've been in Calgary for 20 years, so I've been coming to the Global Energy Show for a while.
00:10:01.100 And, you know, it's interesting to see that now there is a lot more interest in the renewable hydrogen sector.
00:10:08.780 And like I said, I think it's the perfect match to close the gap between renewable and the oil and gas.
00:10:15.680 Excellent.
00:10:16.320 Thank you very much.
00:10:17.100 Yeah, thank you.
00:10:17.500 Thank you very much.