The test facility at Shand Power Station should be nearly completed by the end of the first quarter of 2015 according to one of the principal players in the project.
Mike Monea, president of carbon capture and storage initiatives for SaskPower, said the $70 million addition to the power generating plant will allow the global community an opportunity to test all types of post-combustion noxious gas recovery systems within a commercial power station. Although the experiments won’t be commercial sized themselves, the opportunity to use real life and real case scenarios offered at Shand will prove to be invaluable. The fact that the world’s first commercial sized carbon capture plant is just down the road, will be a positive addition.
The test facility is being constructed on a 50:50 cost-sharing agreement between SaskPower and Hitachi, with Hitachi getting first dibs on using the plant to test some of their gas capturing equipment once it swings into operation.
“A lot of companies want to see end results of the test facility. There is quite a lot of interest in it. I recently attended the National Carbon Capture Centre in Alabama and I know they’re very interested in some option projects at Shand,” said Monea.
Each country or company that rents the equipment and time at the Shand site will have their own propriety and privacy requirements and SaskPower has no problem with that. Just as they also have no problem with items such as Shell’s own CanSolv amine liquids that are being used to capture carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide at Boundary Dam’s Unit 3, the commercial-sized operation.
“We only need to know enough to ensure it’s working safely in our plant. It’s their product,” said Monea.
Shand certainly fits into a lot of business models currently on designer’s desks where they’re looking to test their own theories on capturing noxious gases in a post-combustion setting. They gain knowledge and SaskPower will gain revenue. The plant time and equipment will rent out on an hourly basis and to set up and then operate a decent study and test run, generally takes 1,200 hours or more, he said.
“We have Max Ball here who is a research expert, and he’s in contact with other people around the world. I know there’s a group in Norway who are keenly interested in testing capture products, as are the Chinese. They need to test their products in North America and Boundary Dam is the only place where there is credibility right now. It’s the new Silicon Valley in the clean coal solution game.”
Monea said even though he and others in SaskPower and the provincial government have been tireless in their travelling around the globe, delivering the message, there are still a lot of researchers and politicians who haven’t been introduced to what’s happening in Estevan.
“We haven’t been able to tell our story to everyone, but Estevan is becoming very popular,” Monea said.
The SaskPower executive said the idea of making Estevan and Boundary Dam and Shand a centre of excellence isn’t beyond the realm of reason. He notes there is a lot of money that could be gained if the concept were to be monetized. In other words, there is a real business case to be made, as well as an educational component.
“It would be a shame not to advance the knowledge. There are engineers and student engineers at universities who want to visit because the world centre for carbon capture is now southern Saskatchewan. I visited the University of Edinburgh and they have doctorate students who are dying for a chance to gain real information from coal plants and move beyond simulation models they’ve been forced to work with up to now. So that leads me to think about such things as student and professorial exchanges with the University of Regina, but the U of R needs the financial wherewithal to make it happen. So does SaskPower have a role to play there? It would be wonderful to form a connection with a non-profit division of SaskPower with maybe Natural Resources Canada as a partner and other global partners for research purposes,” the president of carbon capture said.
Monea still he’s still very impressed with the quality of engineering work accomplished by SaskPower’s professional team in a remarkably short space of time.
“I just joined in 2008 and I’ve been totally impressed with the array of talent here and how they got it done and knowing it was the world’s first project of this magnitude.”
Monea said it will be at least six months before suitable assessments can be made on the BD3 project. The strainers that have restricted the CO2 uptake, were being removed on Oct. 10, moving the carbon capture island into 100 per cent efficiency mode. Cost adjustments with vendors will follow. After that, data collected will be plugged into the system to determine what can be done with BD Units 4, 5 and 6.
“I’ve also been surprised by the number of oil production companies wanting CO2. There is a real hunger for it. They even want the CO2 that will come out of Shand when the test facility is up, even though it’s a much smaller scale.”
Monea said SaskPower’s current partner, Cenovus has provided them with a good relationship to date and that company has become specialists in enhanced oil recovery using carbon dioxide. Now others want to use it and gather their own data.
Monea expects that by the end of November, some of the CO2 will be entering the nearby Aquistore, the 3.4 km caverns where the gas can be stored before being called up for oil recovery processes. Right now, Cenovus is using it all, but will eventually just need to blend a few thousand tonnes a week into their existing system.
“You’ll see a bunch of scientists running around there from now on. I just got back from a global greenhouse gas and energy conference in Austin, Texas and I’ll tell you, Saskatchewan was the belle of the ball there. BD3 was showcased and by God we were honoured to be there with 1,200 people scrambling around for four days wanting to know more. Saskatchewan was certainly being talked about down there and that included people from Australia, France, Norway, Germany. They’re talking about Estevan. They don’t always know where it is, but they want to get to that staging site at BD3.”
Monea said they also want to know how the local population is receiving the whole project and the social and environmental implications.
“They want to know how we handle carbon capture equipment and pipelines and whether we prefer this to 8,000 windmills. Saskatchewan has opened doors and right now it all feels a little surreal for me because we’ve all been working years with this miracle plant and then they finally pulled it off. So when I had the chance to head to Austin to talk about Saskatchewan I was proud to talk about Saskatchewan.”
Monea said finishing the Shand project and maybe getting involved in an education component would be an exciting climax to his career with its international scope.
“Maybe they need someone crazy in there to make it happen,” he said with a laugh.
“Simulators, trainers in the plant to educate operators, there are all kinds of ideas. There are 12 countries right now who want to showcase Boundary Dam and politicians are beginning to realize what’s happening and how important it is.”
Monea added a recent trip to Washington gave him an opportunity to open a few doors there, too. He said they, of course, rely on public opinion so they want to know what’s new on the environmental front, not just in the U.S. but around the democratic world.
“They want to know if we’re all right with coal and what we’re doing. Politicians are interested but they don’t understand yet exactly what’s happening. But they do know we’re a target for critics, so we need to make this work and eventually have environmental groups come to our open doors and have a visit on the front line at Estevan. That way they’ll get the correct information by talking with employees and realizing that it’s not an evil plant, that people work there and that maybe electric cars won’t work that well in the winter We need to work with them and make sure they get the truth.”
