Premier Jason Kenney announced on July 6, 2021, that the province of Alberta had acquired NWRP's equity stake, representing 50% of the $10-billion project, with the other 50% owned by Canadian Natural Resources.
[2]: 22 A February 2018 report by the Office of the Auditor General of Alberta entitled "APMC Management of Agreement to Process Bitumen at the Sturgeon Refinery", said that the original agreement between the Alberta government and North West Redwater Partnership (NWRP) resulted in the province taking on "many of the risks as if it were building the refinery as a 75 per cent tollpayer in this arrangement".
[2]: 23 Because of the "unconditional nature of the debt component of the toll payments", a "substantial amount of the risk was transferred to the province" when APMC entered into these agreement.
[2]: 24 [Notes 2] The 2017, Alberta's Industrial Heartland Association's website, listed NWRP's Sturgeon Refiner as one of the major energy projects in the Heartland—"Canada’s largest hydrocarbon processing center" with over forty companies.
[7] The ACTL, which was partially financed through federal government programs and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB), is owned and operated by Enhance Energy and Wolf Midstream.
[6] The September 18, 2007 Alberta government commissioned report, entitled "Our Fair Share", by the Alberta Royalty Review panel had concluded that bitumen royalty rates and formulas had "not kept pace with changes in the resource base and world energy markets"[11][12]: 7 and as a result, Albertans, who own their natural resources, were not receiving their "fair share" from energy development.
[20] On July 21, 2009 Stelmach's provincial government released a BRIK Request for Proposals (RFP) to "procure a long-term contract to process or purchase a share of royalty volumes of bitumen".
[21] In January 2014, under then Premier Jim Prentice, the Building New Petroleum Markets Act was passed, allowing the Minister of Energy to provide loans to projects, like the NWRP's Sturgeon Refinery.
[6] Because of the onerous obligations under the agreement, in June 2018, the provincial New Democratic Party (NDP) under Premier Rachel Notley, had to begin to pay "75 per cent of the debt-servicing costs related to financing of the project."
Even though no revenue had been generated for Alberta by the Sturgeon Refinery, the Alberta Petroleum Marketing Commission (APMC)—a Crown corporation responsible for the "implementation of BRIK policy, processing agreements",[5] had "been making payments averaging $27 million a month related to the financing" the $9.9-billion Sturgeon Refinery, which represents approximately "$466 million in debt-servicing costs" since 2018—tied to the government's "commitments" to the project.
[1] By March 2020, due to start up issues, the refinery was not "processing the government’s bitumen at the facility — or generating revenue for the province from its refining operations" according to a Calgary Herald article.
[1] This increase in payments comes against the backdrop of the collapse of global oil prices precipitated by interconnecting and unprecedented global events—the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, the COVID-19 recession, the 2020 stock market crash, and the 2020 Russia–Saudi Arabia oil price war, which Premier Jason Kenney called—"the greatest challenge" in Alberta's "modern history, threatening its main industry and wreaking havoc on its finances.