SaskPower’s carbon capture and storage (CCS) facility at the Boundary Dam Power Station (BDPS) exceeded its daily capture rate targets for 2018, and captured more than 600,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2).
The information was released by SaskPower on Thursday morning.
“The strong performance of the CCS facility in 2018 is encouraging and demonstrates that clean coal can still have a place in the power generation mix,” said Howard Matthews, SaskPower’s vice-president of power production.
“These positive numbers reflect improvements made during the 2017 planned maintenance outage.”
In 2018, the CCS facility captured a total of 625,996 tonnes of CO2, while the overall availability of the facility was 69 per cent. However, the availability rate increases to 94 per cent if one excludes the days when the CCS facility was available but Boundary Dam Power Station Unit 3 (BD3) was offline due to the powerful thunderstorm that struck the Estevan area on June 14.
That storm resulted in an 84-day outage at BD3. The CCS facility was unable to capture any CO2 during this period. Additionally, BD3 was down 285 hours for two separate boiler tube leaks, and 87 hours following the massive power outage that affected the province Dec. 4.
During the periods CCS was capturing CO2, the average capture rate was 2,505 tonnes per day (TPD), which is greater than the 2,435 TPD daily rate established as a target.
In 2014, Boundary Dam Power Station near Estevan became the first power station in the world to successfully use CCS technology. Since start-up, the facility has captured 2,465,333 tonnes of CO2, the equivalent of taking 616,333 cars off Saskatchewan roads.
CCS is part of SaskPower’s commitment to reduce emissions by 40 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. Reducing the carbon footprint of electricity generation in the province is a key component of Saskatchewan’s Prairie Resilience climate change strategy.
SaskPower continues to post full monthly updates from the Boundary Dam CCS process on its website.
Next week’s edition of the Mercury will have more on this story.
