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Photo by Ryan Remiorz / Canadian Press file photo

“We’re solving market access issues for Canada,” said CN Rail senior manager of product development James Auld of CanaPux, which are squares roughly the size of a yogurt container that smell like freshly poured asphalt.

CN began developing CanaPux three years ago by blending bitumen with a small amount of plastic to make pucks, which can float in water given the lightness of the plastic.

The pucks, Auld said, can be loaded onto railway hopper cars, which normally carry products like grain or coal, rather than tank cars, which carry products such as oil or chlorine. As a result, one railway car could move 650 barrels of oil in puck form, compared with a tanker car that can carry 500 barrels of oil.

Costs would also drop. Current demand for tanker cars has driven the price to lease the units up to $3,500 per month, compared with $350 per month for a hopper car.

Amid delays for new pipelines, shipments of oil by rail jumped 115 per cent from 151,940 barrels per day in December 2017 to 327,229 barrels per day at the end of October 2018, the last month for which National Energy Board data is available.

Turning bitumen into pucks would also eliminate the need for producers to spend money on diluent, a blending agent that is necessary to lighten the viscosity of bitumen to the point where it can flow through a pipeline.

(Pucks improve) the netback to the producer by approximately $15 per barrel Alfred Fischer, senior advisor, Sproule Associates

“It improves the netback to the producer by approximately $15 per barrel,” said Alfred Fischer, a senior advisor with Sproule Associates, who is working on the project.