The Watch
LATITUDE
JASON KENNEY FOLLOWS THROUGH ON PROMISES
In the spring session of the Alberta Legislature, the UCP began making good on its campaign promises. The party planned to introduce about a dozen bills by the start of August, beginning with the repeal of the carbon tax. That one was in place at the time of this writing—and the federal government had countered that it would replace Alberta’s carbon tax with its own. Premier Jason Kenney has also indicated the party will lay out a timeline for the government’s plan to cut corporate tax from 12 to eight per cent by 2022, via Bill 3. In addition to these changes, the UCP has lowered minimum wage to $13 an hour for youth under 17 and brought back the hour- to-hour exchange for banked overtime hours. The government struck a panel to create a plan for cutting spending as it works towards eliminating deficits by 2022-23 without increasing taxes. Former Saskatchewan finance minister Janice MacKinnon has been appointed to lead the six-member panel and present her findings ahead of the fall budget.
BILLS APLENTY Alberta Premier Jason Kenney is rolling out an aggressive schedule of bills, including the elimination of the carbon tax on consumption.
LEDUC 2.1: LITHIUM PRODUCTION COULD BUILD UPON THE FORMATION’S STORIED PAST Back in 1947, the drilling of Leduc No. 1 kick-started a new era for Alberta’s petroleum industry. Now, a Calgary-based start-up hopes to do much the same thing for lithium. E3 Metals’ proprietary technology would extract the valuable metal from large reserves thought to lie within the Leduc Formation. How large? Really large. The company estimates there are 6.7 million tonnes of lithium dissolved in brine within Leduc reservoirs, making it one of the world’s largest sources of an increasingly important and valuable metal. Because of society’s growing reliance on lithium-ion batteries, big dollars are at stake. The price of lithium has been rising, increasing more than 75 per cent in just one year to US $16,500 in 2018. Some experts and pundits predict the lithium battery market could be
worth US $77.4 billion by 2024, hitching a ride on the growing popularity of electric vehicles. To access lithium, companies must draw brine to the surface, concentrate it, and then extract metal as either lithium carbonate or lithium hydroxide. Bringing brine to the surface is well understood. So is extracting lithium from concentrate. It’s that middle step that’s murkier: creating the concentrate. Since 2017, E3 Metals has been working on a new method of doing just that, with a polymer resin chemical. The start-up has received help from the University of Alberta (with funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council) and Alberta Innovates. If laboratory tests are successful over the next few months, the company plans to design a pilot plant in the hopes of scaling up to a commercial processing facility. And later on, who knows: maybe Albertans will be regaling some later generation with romantic tales of drilling for lithium.
40 | PEG SUMMER 2019
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