Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
11/6/2015
SaskPower’s Boundary Dam Unit 3 carbon capture and storage project is back up and running this week after a planned outage, company CEO Mike Marsh told GHG Monitor this week by email. “Our two-month scheduled maintenance ended this week and we’re back online, capturing carbon dioxide. We’re working on increasing capacity and we’re targeting the capture of 800,000 tonnes of CO2 in 2016,” Marsh stated.
The overhaul involved five main components, Marsh wrote. First, the amine storage tank had a new liner installed due to leakage. During the process, the amine was transferred to a secondary storage tank at the facility. The new lining arrived at the plant in mid-September.
The outage also provided an opportunity to address mechanical issues with the mechanical vapor recompressors, which are required for the plant to achieve full capture capacity. During the outage the company also “addressed fixes in various stack vents,” Marsh explained. In addition, it cleaned “various components.”
Furthermore, the outage served as the unit’s regularly scheduled three-week biannual outage for planned maintenance, which Marsh said is a process that every other SaskPower unit also experiences. “All of our units have a calendar of scheduled maintenance. It allows us to keep them running smoothly and identify issues early on,” Marsh said.
SaskPower has been taking heat in the Saskatchewan provincial legislature for revelations that the Crowne utility had to pay penalties to Alberta-based oil company Cenovus for undersupplying CO2 in 2014. SaskPower had negotiated an agreement with Cenovus to sell CO2 captured at the Boundary Dam project for use in enhanced oil recovery (EOR). However, the plant started up a few months later than anticipated, officially opening in October 2014 instead of April of that year. The facility has yet to reach full capacity and was run at a lower capacity after it became operational in part because Cenovus did not need the CO2 that would be produced at full capacity. Mechanical fixes were also needed on the vapor recompressors, which are essential to reach full capture capacity.
The plant was able to capture 400,000 tons of CO2 in 2014 but had to pay a $12 million (CAD) penalty to Cenovus. However, even without running at full capture capacity so far in 2015, the company should make a net profit on the sale of CO2 regardless of any penalties incurred this year, Marsh said. “Due to scheduled and unscheduled downtimes, we weren’t always able to meet our volume commitments to our off-taker. However, the volumes of CO2 we did sell will outweigh any penalties for shortfalls. At the end of 2015, we estimate we will have paid approximately $5-6 million for shortfalls and brought in about $11 million in revenue,” he wrote.
