The Heartland Journey

Amelie Delisle, P. Eng. – General Manager of HPC Commercial

Shares her excitement for the Heartland Polymers start-up and what she learned along the way.

It’s been an amazing 10-year journey to bring Heartland Polymers to life from an idea to a world-scale build and the development of a global brand. Amelie Delisle shares her excitement as the operational date approaches.

“This project is so exciting,” says Delisle. “It started off as just an idea on paper and to see it come together and the magnitude and scale of the effort that it’s taken. How the scaling up has gone from the first pile in the ground one frigid January morning to  thousands of people coming to site each day – that’s what excites me. It’s that tangibility of the project, how real it is and how close we are to start up.”

The First of its Kind

Heartland’s portfolio of quality polypropylene products will be manufactured at North America’s first integrated propane dehydrogenation (PDH) and polypropylene (PP) production facility, located in Strathcona County, Alberta, Canada. Heartland Petrochemical Complex is connected to a vast network of low-carbon rail and storage facilities that will ensure reliable delivery of product to North American and global customers. When operations begin in 2022, Heartland our plant capacity is 525,000 metric tonnes per year.

As an engineer, Delisle says she’s been fascinated by the powerful combination of technology and chemistry that has helped shape a leading-edge facility with the lowest anticipated GHG emissions of a comparable plant globally.

“PDH and PP being integrated together, on the same site, offers us a lot of flexibility from the perspective of commodity price exposure, and operating efficiency. These are feature of our set-up that will directly benefit the customer.”

Growing With the Business

The project has truly been a career milestone for Delisle personally, but she says it has been a team effort every step of the way.

“I feel like my career has really kind of grown with the project,” she says. “We’ve progressed together. And along the way, I was fortunate to have some great people support me in my endeavours. It’s been a lot of work, but I can’t believe I’m here leading this amazing team of people and working with them and seeing this happen.”

It was one thing to help design and build a world-class production facility, but Delisle says the development of a new brand, logo, and go-to-market plan challenged her in new and refreshing ways.

“We’re in the phase of the project now where we’re building our brand and preparing our entry to market. It’s a natural evolution starting from having the idea of building the Complex to creating how we’ll showcase our work and product to customers.

This part of the work is very interesting. It’s very motivating. Building a brand, it’s such a creative exercise that I’ve been enjoying it very much because it’s very different from what we normally do. We got to work with so many great creative minds to come up with the Heartland Polymers brand.”

The brand, she feels, accurately reflects the new energy and fresh thinking that Heartland Polymers and its team is bringing to the global industry – believing in better and then working every day to prove it.

“There’s so many aspects of working on this project that have been rewarding. Seeing it come to life; it’s a dream come true. Sometimes I can’t believe that we’re almost there.”

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