Thank you. I'll stay within the five minutes.
As the chair knows, Williams is a large natural gas infrastructure company headquartered in the United States but with assets in Canada. We're that essential middleman that gathers, processes, and delivers natural gas and natural gas liquids to our customers. We have an innovative gas-processing business in Alberta. We capture natural gas from oil sands and we process and separate it and create marketable products like propane and ethylene. These things get turned into plastics and a whole host of other products.
We are actually well positioned to take advantage of supply growth coming from new shale reserves in the United States and in Canada. This means that we're a company with choices as to where to invest next. It's in this context that I can speak about the accelerated capital cost allowance.
We have a project that we have announced for Canada, in Alberta, which will be in the order of around $1 billion and is still undergoing some internal scrutiny as we continue to refine our engineering and implementation plans. Not knowing whether the 50-50 flat ACCA will continue or whether the rate would revert back to the old 30% declining balance is one factor that could impact our economic decision here. What we do know is that the old declining balance of 30% is at a disadvantage when compared to what the U.S. system uses for depreciation of equipment used in the manufacture of chemicals and fertilizers—those specific comparisons.
Having examined the two systems, we calculate that with all other things held equal, the difference in CCA rates between Canada and the United States is in fact significant and can have an impact on our investment decision. We wanted to underline this as a current and real-life example of the things that can impact an investment decision in Canada.
Of course, there are many, many factors in any business decision, and Williams enjoys doing business in Canada for a variety of good reasons, but we in the Canadian office compete internally in Williams in North America for every investment opportunity, so every small measure counts, and we have determined through our analysis that this one is a significant factor. That's what I have for my experience.