CARRIE KELLY
The Pipeline
A decade after it was dreamed, the Long Lake oilsands project is in start up mode.
Marvin Romanow, executive vice president and chief financial officer for Nexen Inc. recently gave an update on the project. Long Lake is a 50/50 joint venture of Nexen and OPTI Canada.

“This is a project that had it’s early initiation stages close to 10 years ago,” Romanow said. “Ten years later, at very strong commodity prices, we are on the cusp of bringing on a very significant project at Long Lake. SAG-D is on stream and performing and ramping up.”
As of June 17, the project was more than 70 per cent commissioned. The upgrader is expected to be on stream late in the summer.
The Long Lake project, about a 45-minute drive south of Fort McMurray, is no ordinary oilsands project, Romanow said.
“We have a very innovative technology that is largely independent of natural gas. It uses a portion of the barrels that virtually all our competitors throw away as a source of energy.”
Phase I of Long Lake represents about 10 per cent of the resource there, said Gary Nieuwenburg, senior vice president of synthetic crude.
The project will be at 25,000 barrels per day by mid-August.
“Our crude goes down the Athabasca pipeline which is an Enbridge lease,” he said.
Potential sanctioning of Phase II is the next step for Long Lake, but first the companies want to see how Phase I performs and what the government is going to do about carbon sequestration.
“We need some more regulatory clarity around federal climate change proposals,” said Nieuwenburg. “There really isn’t a lot of clarity around that yet. We’re meeting with the government regularly and it's all around getting clarity on what this means for us — things as simple as what is a facility, is SAG-D separate from the upgrader — you need to know that because it dictates how much you have to offset, etc. It is an issue for us.”
There could be potential design changes for Phase II if new government regulations come in.
If everything goes well, potential sanctioning of Phase II could happen as soon as the end of the year.

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