ELE has designed and is developing a boutique-style, clean-energy refinery and solar facility in southeast Saskatchewan. The Belle Plaine Clean-Tech Refinery and Solar Project is situated in the Rural Municipality of Pense, approximately 4 km northwest of the Village of Belle Plaine, on Treaty 4 Territory, which is the traditional territory of the Nehiyaw/Cree, Saulteaux, Dakota, Lakota, Nakota and formerly Blackfoot First Nations peoples. ELE has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) and is in the process of forming a limited partnership with the Ochapowace First Nation, via its economic arm, the Atoskewin Business Development Corporation.
Located near the Bakken Formation, a major reservoir of low-sulphur, light-crude oil, our unique, innovative, and diverse renewable-energy project is tailored to meet local and national industry needs. Customers will benefit from our high-quality, low-carbon-contaminate products designed to generate exponential revenue streams, employ numerous Saskatchewan residents, while meeting Canada’s net-zero-emission mandates for 2035 and beyond.
The refinery will initially process 30,000 barrels per day (bpd) of low-sulphur, sweet, light-crude oil. Our product lightness is a distinguishing feature among Saskatchewan’s two other scalable refineries whose offerings specialize in the medium- to heavier crudes. Other Canadian refineries like those in Vancouver and on the East Coast primarily process mid-to-heavy crudes. Further yet, North America’s only other recent greenfield refinery development is in North Dakota, which has yet to reach full capacity, and has different product offerings. It goes without saying, ELE’s lighter, cleaner product line is truly a niche North American renewable fuel.
Our boutique refinery model optimizes the number of daily barrels of oil produced—a clean production limit of 30,000 barrels per day (bpd)—unlike the refineries that continue to operate at a minimum 100,000 bpd per day. This lighter limit, coupled with our site’s proximity to the original pre-processed product, naturally, lessens the load and the long-haul duration for transporting the product—both to the project site by rail, and off-site by a combination of rail and truck transport.
Our project has received positive responses from investors, the Saskatchewan Government, and First Nations partners. At the heart of our operation, we are innovators. We are building something incredible that has not been achieved in Canada yet. By combining our environmentally conscious ethos with our knowledge capabilities, business acumen, and people-powered perseverance, we are confident that we will deliver a renewable source of energy that will be the envy of competitors the world over.
Our project will follow a strict protocol to ensure that each site component we develop will primarily reflect an environmentally sound focus. Whether at the oil refinery or the 125-megawatt solar farm and railyard, we will be utilizing the most technologically advanced methods to process, refine, and capture our energy—along with most of its emissions—significantly reducing the overall operational impact to our communities and on the ever-changing climate. Through our integrated carbon recapture program, set to debut in Phase 2, our goal is to contain upward of 90 per cent of carbon dioxide emissions.