AT THE MAJOR CCS PROJECTS: QUEST

Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
09/14/12

AT QUEST: PROJECT FACILITY TO BE CONSTRUCTED EOR-READY

Even though Shell Canada is not going to pursue enhanced oil recovery offtake agreements for the CO2 captured at its Quest carbon capture and storage project, the company is building the facility to be EOR-ready in case it eventually does decide to pursue the option, according to a project official. Last week, Shell and its project partners Chevron and Marathon Oil announced that they gave final approval to Quest, their “flagship” CCS project, and that construction operations would begin almost immediately. The consortium said the $1.35 billion project will entail capturing roughly one-third of emissions from its existing Scotford Upgrader located near Edmonton, Alberta. That facility processes roughly 250,000 barrels a day of bitumen, or heavy crude oil, from nearby oil sands. While the consortium plans on transporting the one million tons of CO2 captured annually about 50 miles north for injection into a deep saline aquifer, EOR is not off the table, GHG Monitor previously reported.

In an interview this week, one of Shell’s project leads for Quest, Len Heckel, said that the company will construct the operation to be EOR-ready in case project partners decide to pursue CO2 offtake contracts in the future. “The EOR option is something that we’ve always been looking at, and it’s built into our design that we can, with the right commercial arrangement, look at selling our CO2 to a third party,” Heckel said. “We have that ability built into our design now, so if we reached the right commercial arrangement we could go ahead and do that.” Heckel said that it does not take much to prep an operation such as Quest to be EOR-ready—he said the construction team is attaching a ‘T-piece’ of pipe at a certain point along the pipeline that will stand ready to divert some of the CO2 if an EOR operator later chooses to sign a contract with the project consortium. The project is expected to be fully operational in 2015 and will utilize a methyl diethanolamine-based (MDEA) amine capture technology developed by Shell called ADIP-X to separate the CO2 from the main gas stream.

Shell Looks to Modularization Work to Save Money

Heckel told GHG Monitor that construction has already begun onsite in earnest. He said that current work is focusing on dewatering the capture site’s foundation, which is situated along a high water table. Drilling activities are scheduled to be commencing “very shortly” later this fall, according to Heckel. “[Most construction work] will largely be winding down for the winter, because we do want to work mostly in the summer for the traditional construction activities,” Heckel said. “So while the weather is good we’ll effectively be continuing work on site, but as we get towards the end of the year and the weather drops, we’ll probably taper off our activities at the capture site itself.”

A key portion of construction, Heckel said, will be conducted in local modular yards, a technique widely used in the oil sands industry that takes advantage of doing as much work as possible offsite. Modules are pre-assembled in those yards and then delivered to the Scotford site via Alberta’s heavy load highway corridor, an approach Heckel said will be cost effective and will allow for a more controlled construction environment. “This is certainly not a first,” Heckel said. “The modularization concept has been around for a long time in Alberta as part of the oil sands industry, but this will be new for CCS. We have this infrastructure already set with the modular yards in the Edmonton area.”

Heckel said that constructing many of the capture site’s components offsite will also allow for more safety for its workers. “When you have a large facility like this that you’re going to be building on a running facility like we have at the upgrader, the chances for some kind of process safety incident would be higher,” Heckel said. “The risk element is a little better if you’re building it offsite and assembling it more quickly onsite—you’re minimizing the risk somewhat, and it gives you a bit tighter control around the modules themselves…. When you factor in the process safety risks and the chance for avoiding errors in terms of building a large facility, I think that’s where we came to the conclusion that this is a better system for us.”