The government-backed bitumen refinery northeast of Edmonton. Fifty thousand barrels a day of bitumen that never sees an export pipe.
Field guide entry · written September 23, 2026.
The North West Redwater Sturgeon Refinery is the plant people mean when they say 'the government refinery.' It sits northeast of Edmonton and it is the first refinery built in Canada since 1984, and the first anywhere in the country designed to take bitumen all the way to finished products. Most oil sands plants either upgrade bitumen to synthetic crude (which still needs refining) or dilute it for sale. Sturgeon does the whole job: bitumen in, diesel out.
Phase 1 takes 50,000 barrels a day of bitumen blended with 29,000 barrels a day of diluent. Out the other end come roughly 40,000 barrels a day of low-sulphur diesel, about 28,000 barrels a day of recovered diluent, and 13,000 barrels a day of lighter products. The diluent recovery matters: of the 29 kb/d that goes in, 28 comes back, so the plant's net draw on the diluent pool is only about 1 kb/d. The refinery gasifies the heaviest residue to make its own hydrogen, and it was built with carbon capture on the hydrogen unit.
The commercial structure is a tolling deal. The Alberta Petroleum Marketing Commission, the province's oil marketer, is the 75 percent toll payer; CNRL covers the other 25 percent. Under tolling, the two parties keep ownership of the bitumen straight through the refining process and pay the plant a fee for the service. The province's auditor general later described the deal as high benefit and high risk: about $26 billion in toll payments over thirty years, with the province carrying most of the risk of a 75 percent payer while holding a minority vote. In a 2021 restructuring the province took a 50 percent ownership stake from North West Refining, CNRL took operational leadership, and the processing agreement was extended to 2058. The province says the rework improved its net present value by about $2 billion.
Sturgeon is 50 kb/d of baseload domestic bitumen demand. Those barrels never touch an export pipeline, which tightens the exportable surplus by exactly that amount. It is also a demand-side maintenance risk in reverse: if Sturgeon ever takes a major turnaround, 50 kb/d of bitumen suddenly needs a pipe to market.
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