Mothballed storage, railway and trucking facilities — left behind by the closure of the aged Celanese plant last year — will be revived as a new terminal for industrial “diluent.”

Keyera Facilities Income Fund, an energy processing and transportation firm, paid $32 million for 17 hectares of storage tanks, train tracks, roads and loading systems at the former petrochemical site on the boundary between Edmonton and Strathcona County.

Another $18 million will be spent on building a pair of four-kilometre pipelines to hook the new terminal up to Keyera operations at Fort Saskatchewan that are connected to oilsands delivery networks.

The storage and loading facilities occupy about eight per cent of the 202-hectare former Celanese site, which was sold last winter to real estate firm Worthington Properties for an undisclosed price.

The mothballed installations are in good enough condition to make a limited start into oilsands service almost immediately under a new name as the Alberta Diluent Terminal, or ADT for short, Keyera said.

The site can handle unit or single-cargo railway trains of 100 tank cars each. When fully up and running after completing pipeline construction, the new terminal will generate a five-fold increase in Keyera’s Edmonton-area diluent traffic to more than 60,000 barrels per day.

The operation will chiefly import and distribute an oil refinery and gas plant byproduct known as condensate, or natural gasoline, Keyera investor relations director John Cobb said in an interview.

The material fetches premium prices as an exceptionally light and slippery form of oil. Condensate justifies its expense as a stellar lubricant for sliding tarry bitumen through pipelines, he said.

The byproduct is an economical thinner because less of it is required than the main alternative, upgraded but still heavier synthetic crude obtained from oilsands plants, he said.

Keyera’s new terminal is an early tributary to a diluent river emerging from projects such as a new $2.2-billion pipeline called Southern Lights that Enbridge Inc. recently obtained approval to build.

The new Enbridge line will import 180,000 barrels a day of byproducts from Chicago refineries. But Cobb described Keyera’s terminal and the new pipeline as complementary in the long run.

Alberta oilsands diluent needs are forecast to multiply 10-fold to 200,000 barrels daily by 2012, then jump again to 270,000 barrels daily in 2017, as bitumen traffic grows between northern bitumen production sites, Edmonton-area upgraders and U.S. refineries.