CALGARY
Talks between Ottawa, Alberta and major oil sands companies to finalize a binding agreement for the Pathways carbon-capture project may run past a Nov. 15 deadline, Imperial Oil Ltd. chief executive John Whelan said Friday.
Whelan said he is “optimistic and encouraged” by the progress made so far.
“There’s still a lot of work left to do,” he told analysts on a conference call. “There’s no lack of energy or desire to get to definitive agreements.”
The discussions stem from a memorandum of understanding signed by the federal and Alberta governments in November 2025, which tied the construction of a new oil pipeline from Alberta to the West Coast to lowering emissions through the massive Pathways carbon-capture project.
In July, the governments signed a non-binding MOU with five major oil sands companies, including Imperial, to signal support for new financial and regulatory frameworks that would “enable sustained and substantial oil sands development and production growth.”
Whelan said the key is balancing the costs of implementing Pathways with other policies that will benefit industry.
“That’s pretty complex,” he said, but the group is “working really well together to try to get that, you know, marriage of all those things in place that works for everybody.”
Part of that work includes details on royalty incentives from the Alberta government.
The Pathways project involves a pipeline network to carry carbon dioxide captured from oil sands sites to an underground storage hub near Cold Lake, Alta.
The alliance said the project will have the capacity to transport and store about six million tonnes per year of captured CO2 by the mid-2030s, with parties aiming for another 10 million tonnes of reductions by 2045.
That is a significant scale-back from the 22 million tonnes of emissions by 2030 they had earlier targeted.
Whelan made the comments as Imperial reported a third-quarter profit of $2.45 billion, up from $539 million in the same quarter last year.
The profit amounted to $5.11 per diluted share for the quarter compared with a profit of $1.07 per diluted share a year ago.
Total revenue and other income amounted to $16.21 billion, up from $12.05 billion in the same quarter last year.
Imperial’s third-quarter downstream earnings climbed to $1.56 billion from $444 million year-over-year.
The company refined an average of 381,000 barrels of crude each day in the three months ending Sept. 30, down from 425,000 in the third quarter of 2025.
Upstream production averaged 418,000 gross oil-equivalent barrels per day, down from 462,000 a year ago, primarily due to lower production at Kearl and planned maintenance turnarounds at Cold Lake and Syncrude.
Production in the oil sands was also crimped by a third-party pipeline outage caused by an electrical transformer failure in mid-September, Whelan said.
“We don’t see systemic issues. We see one-offs that we’re going to learn from,” he said.
The price of West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. light oil benchmark, averaged US$85.68 during the third quarter, up from US$64.97 during the same period a year earlier.
Western Canada Select, the price of heavy crude produced in Alberta, rose to US$71.90 from US$54.62 year-over-year during the quarter.
Whelan expects the price gap between WTI and WCS to continue to widen, but said the high price of WCS remains “very constructive.”
The other Oil Sands Alliance members are Suncor Energy Inc., Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., Cenovus Energy Inc. and ConocoPhillips Co.
Whelan said the alliance meets every week on the topic and has teams working with both governments daily.
“We’re going to make sure we do all the right things that enable us to execute on the definitive agreement,” he said.
This story was written by the e2gold.ca newsroom from reporting by The Globe and Mail and BNN Bloomberg. Quotes are checked word for word against that reporting.