LAKELAND - Brian Jean is looking forward to a prosperous 2024 for his constituents and all Albertans, and maybe some new workers in the region as well.
The MLA for Ft. McMurray-Lac La Biche and the provincial minister for Energy and Minerals says anticipated investments in the province and the region in the near future will bring opportunity across the province. As the local provincial representative for local residents and a provincial minister, Jean says he's been bolstered by support coming from local neighbourhoods to all corners of Alberta.
“I think most people have confidence that I’m going to get that stuff delivered,” he said, referencing two large projects in particular — one at the Dow Chemical plant in Fort Saskatchewan that promises net-zero carbon emissions as it transforms the chemical compound ethane into plastics, and the other in northeastern Alberta that will be an underground carbon capture site — that are set to begin next year. The projects, he says, will have a positive impact on local economies.
The $10.9 billion investment in the Fort Saskatchewan “Path2Zero” expansion project is slated to begin in 2024. The project will create the world’s first net-zero Scope One and Two carbon emissions integrated ethylene cracker and derivatives site. Ethane crackers are plants that help to transform ethane – a hazardous compound found in natural gas – into plastics.
According to Jean, this project will create six to seven thousand full-time jobs over a seven-year period.
“The idea is that those people will be from that area, and the investment will come to Edmonton, and to Lac La Biche, and to Fort McMurray as a result of the competitive nature of the workforce,” he stated.
The $36 billion Carbon Capture Utilization and Storage project (CCUS), which will run over 11 years, is slated to create 20,000 jobs during that period. The initiative is an agreement between the federal and provincial governments designed to de-carbonize the oil sands and the oil and gas sector in Alberta.
Although the CCUS project is expected to start next year, according to Jean, it may not get off the ground until 2025, all depending upon the federal government.
He added that the project is funded by investments not only from the province and Ottawa, but oil companies as well.
“I think it’s going to be a huge investment from Fort McMurray all the way down to Edmonton,” he said.
If done right, Jean says, these investments together should produce a huge growth in investment and infrastructure across the province, particularly in roads and housing.
Jean, who was a federal Member of Parliament for the region from 2004 until 2014, and then joined provincial politics as the area’s MLA in 2015 before leaving the political spotlight until 2022, says economic development and local growth for the region has always been a driving force for him.
If you work here, stay here
Jean says that since returning to the political scene as the area’s MLA in 2022, and in the years before when he was thinking about returning to the public stage, much of the feedback and advice he received emphasized the need not only for stronger economic development, but also for more sustained benefits from those larger projects in the rural communities he represents. He continues to push companies to put workers into communities on a more permanent basis, and not into work camps where an out-of-area workforce might fly in and fly out without ever providing economic benefit to the local community.
“I think this time we are going to get another boom here and we have the opportunity to build communities, not work camps…and we need to focus on that…and not allow work camps to be built in the future, because they are not helping with the communities,” he told Lakeland This Week, adding that this does not only pertain to his constituency, but across Alberta.
He said it is imperative to educate and employ local residents to fill the jobs that are going to be necessary over the coming decades.
“If we do it right as a government, we will invest in a lot of educational opportunities for people to get trained in those trades so that they’re employed and then encourage people to move here and relocate their family here and live here,” Jean said.
