Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
10/3/2014
What had looked to be a promising pilot program testing technologies from Canadian-based CO2 Solutions and Neumann Systems Group (NSG) has been canceled, CO2 Solutions announced late last week. However, the company also announced that testing of its own enzyme-enabled carbon capture technology will be conducted at the University of North Dakota later this year. When the pilot was announced in June, it was meant to test the use of CO2 Solutions enzyme-based technology and NSG’s NeuStream compact absorber systems. The pilot program was initially set to launch in April 2015, and was later moved up to this month. Explaining the decision to cancel the pilot, CO2 Solutions President and CEO Evan Price told GHG Monitor this week that the company felt their resources may be better invested elsewhere. “We don’t have the resources to do these kinds of piloting steps, several of them at the same time. So we came to the realization that the direction that we were heading with Neumann … for our own interests, it was better for us to be elsewhere," Price said. A representative from NSG was not immediately available for comment.
In what Price says was a separate decision, the company signed an agreement with the University of North Dakota Energy and Environmental Research Center (EERC) to test its technology at the EERC’s existing testing facility. Testing will be conducted using natural gas and coal flue gas for three weeks in December. Testing at the University of North Dakota has several benefits, Price explained. “The equipment is already installed, it’s in North Dakota, which is a very interesting place because of the shale oil and the production that takes place there and the interest in that particular area for CO2 to inject underground for enhanced oil recovery, there’s a very strong demand, I mean they talk about a CO2 deficit in North Dakota so that was an element of interest,” he said.
Further, working with EERC is an attractive opportunity, Price said. “Around them the DOE [Department of Energy] is always supportive and there are other partners that are involved in there so it’s a pilot stage that within the community of EERC and its supporters will get a greater amount of publicity,” he said. “The results will be defused to a larger audience which is the kind of thing that obviously we’re interested in. … It’s in the states as well so that’s positive for us because we want some exposure in the United States and so all those things are putting it together."
Husky Pilot Progressing, Scaled Down Slightly
Knowledge gained from the EERC testing will be applied to a pilot program planned for the summer of 2015 at Husky Energy’s Pikes Peak South, Saskatchewan, heavy oil site. “At the University of North Dakota, that’s more an environment to say ‘let’s do a few days of this, a few days of that and so on,’ switch back and forth and to allow us to get exactly the parameters that we will then be implementing later on next summer,” Price said.
The Husky pilot will run approximately six months and at this point is progressing well, although some changes have been made to the initial plan which called for a carbon capture rate of 15 tonnes a day. "When we drew up the original plans we were originally shooting for 15. To be honest, between 10 and 15, from a practical perspective, has got really absolutely no effect and so as we were moving along and working with our engineers to find out what is the optimal size in terms of sourcing of equipment and sizing of equipment and all that … Obviously we’re working in a budgetary framework so we knew that there could be some adjustments as we were getting closer,” Price said. "As we’ve been designing it we came to the conclusion that 10 would be a more financially optimum number for the pilot but in terms of the testing itself, no effect.”
