Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
2/13/2015
Work at Shell’s Quest carbon capture and storage project in Alberta is nearing mechanical completion, and the project is on schedule to begin CO2 injection in the second quarter of this year, Tim Wiwchar, Quest Project Lead, said last week at the Americas Forum hosted by the Global CCS Institute. “We are actually in the final stages. Within the next couple of weeks we’ll actually have mechanical completion, and so actually have started into the commissioning and start-up phase,” he said. “During that phase we start to get into testing of our safety systems, control loops, cleaning out the pipelines from construction and so that is a fairly lengthy process,” Wiwchar said. “If things go well what we’re looking at is having injection kind of into late Q2.”
Quest has been under construction since September 2012. The project is a retrofit of capture technology onto Shell’s existing Scotford oil sands upgrader near Edmonton, Alberta. When completed, the project will remove an estimated 1 million tonnes of CO2 annually from the bitumen upgrader and transport it nearly 40 miles north to a storage site. It is projected that the project can run at this capacity for 25 years.
Moving forward, there is some technical work to be done at the site. “We have some tie-ins yet for one of our third hydrogen manufacturing units that we want to do and then once we get into the summer months … we’ll be ready to do commercial tests that we’ve agreed to with the government of Alberta and [Natural Resources Canada]. Once we’ve passed those then Quest is then deemed commercially viable, commercially operational,” Wiwchar said. The pipeline has been finished but some clean-up is on hold until spring. “The pipeline was finished the fall … of last year. We still have some clean-up that we have to wait until spring to accomplish because we backfilled the pipeline so we might need some slumping up of some of the dirt that we’ll have to fix up, but the pipeline itself is mechanically complete,” Wiwchar told GHG Monitor this week.
Quest Considering DOE MMV Technology
The U.S. Department of Energy and Shell Canada announced last week an agreement to test advanced monitoring, verification and accounting (MVA) technology at the Quest project. Technology developed by DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) will be tested alongside Shell’s own MVA technology, already installed at the project’s underground storage site, a saline aquifer, though this will not happen for some time, Wiwchar told GHG Monitor. “The agreement that we have with the U.S. DOE is to begin discussions looking at the technologies that they have, so we’ve done an initial look and found that there’s several that would be of interest that could supplement what we have today so we’ve begun those talks now and we expect those to take a couple of months,” he said.
Wiwchar added, “We’re probably not looking to have anything officially signed until kind of the second half of the year. We’ve got all the equipment that we have for our MMV program we have in place [and] it’s monitoring and this agreement with the U.S. DOE is not going to be involved in the core MMV program just quite yet.”
