The Petroleum Technology Research Centre’s (PTRC) Aquistore project in southeast Saskatchewan near Estevan is attracting a great deal of international attention that could have some significant ramifications in the near future.
Norm Sacuta, PTRC’s communications manager, told the Mercury last week the research centre, located on the campus at the University of Regina, recently signed a collaborative agreement with the Illinois State Geological Survey and a memorandum of agreement on carbon capture and storage research with South Africa.
Those agreements came just a few days after the research centre announced they had surpassed the 100,000-tonne mark of stored carbon dioxide in the 3.2-kilometre deep well.
That announcement also preceded the PTRC’s presentation at the annual Greenhouse Gas Technologies Conference in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Project manager Kyle Worth recounted successful research projects conducted at the Aquistore site, including an extensive seismic monitoring program, the first in the world to produce an image of injected CO2 at a depth of over 3.2 km. The CO2 is injected in a saline sandstone formation.
Injection rates averaged about 500 tonnes per day from the Boundary Dam Power Station’s Unit 3 which is outfitted with a carbon capture island that removes the carbon dioxide in a post combustion process.
The tests are confirming that the gas can be stored in a safe and secure manner. The centre has been engaged in an ongoing 15- year research project near Weyburn as well.
Sacuta said in some instances the agreements contain a monetary element.
The agreement with the Illinois centre near Decatur combines research knowledge from the PTRC and information gathered from the Illinois Basin, a large-scale demonstration project that has stored just under one million tonnes of CO2 from Archer Daniels Midland’s biofuel processing plant in that state. They said they will build an industrial scale project in 2017 while collaborating with the PTRC, and sharing the monitoring results.
“Aquistore and the Decatur project share many common goals,” said Ken From, PTRC’s executive officer who spoke to the gathering in Lausanne. “Projects like Decatur and Aquistore provide fact-based data to regulators, industry and the general public, allowing for informed decisions around carbon capture and storage for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”
The agreement could lead to the possibility of joint research proposals, exchanges of scientists and technical personnel and expansion of the reach of the organizations to other jurisdictions that are implementing carbon capture and storage projects.
The South African memorandum of understanding involves PTRC and the South African National Energy Development Institute (SANEDI).
This agreement includes measurement, monitoring and verification of injected CO2 as well as public engagement and outreach strategies.
The two countries and agencies have a long-standing relationship on CCS that began in the summer of 2012 when SANEDI geologists made the 15,700-km trip to Estevan during the Aquistore drilling process and the drilling of the injection and observation wells. PTRC has also hosted outreach staff from South Africa’s Centre for Carbon Capture and Storage, a division of SANEDI, for open discussion on the public engagement and challenges associated with the projects.
“Their coal projects are different from ours but regardless, the interest in storage is similar to getting the data is important. The memorandum of understanding might well involve monetary negotiations to get access to data,” said Sacuta since PTRC does own the rights and control of certain storage data. “We have hard core data, have tested for other companies and we compare subsurface results all the time, not just for CO2 but also information for potash, oil and gas industries that want that kind of technology and information.”
Sacuta said a company in Edmonton has done some subsurface storage work in the same underground formation being used by Aquistore, so there may be opportunities to discuss results with them in the future.
He noted that carbon storage isn’t just for the coal-fired industries since other businesses such as the cement and steel-making corporations need to find solutions for their emissions too. “Other industrial processes that we’ll not be getting rid of. They aren’t going away, so it doesn’t matter really where the CO2 comes from, it needs to be stored safely, and the only option is storage,” said Sacuta.
