The Boundary Dam Unit 3 Integrated Carbon Capture and Storage Project in Saskatchewan has been performing “exceedingly well” since an overhaul last fall, SaskPower CEO Mike Marsh told the editorial board of the Regina Leader-Post in a recently published Q&A. “We’re very happy with the performance of the plant. We’re achieving our production targets for our customer, Cenovus, and we’re also delivering a substantial amount of CO2 to the Aquistore facility (attached to the CCS plant and operated by the Petroleum Technology Research Centre),” Marsh said.
Members of the province’s New Democratic Party alleged last year that the performance of the SaskPower project had been misrepresented and that the capital utility had cost taxpayers a significant amount of money due to fines imposed by Cenovus over the undersupply of CO2 to the off-taker. “We acknowledge that statements that were made by the company and individuals regarding the early operations of that facility were a little over the top, a little more optimistic than they should have been, given how that plant was performing,” Marsh said.
The plant was taken offline for several weeks last fall, and several major issues with the facility were addressed. Since that time, performance has been as advertised, according to monthly updates from SaskPower.
“So November, December were record months at the time, and we had a phenomenal first three months of this year — January, February, March — where we’ve achieved 217,000 tonnes (of CO2 captured),” Marsh said. “We’re going to be having an outage in May and then the plan is to have another outage in summer and a longer outage in September where we plan to replace a number of other components as well. We’re working on a three-year time horizon to identify and correct all of the deficiencies. You don’t identify them all on the first day of operation. You keep closing the gap, identifying where the problems are, and that’s what we’re doing right now.”
