PTRC MOVES FORWARD WITH AQUISTORE PROJECT

Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
08/31/12

ESTEVAN, Saskatchewan—Researchers are moving forward on early drilling and sampling efforts here in the shadow of SaskPower’s Boundary Dam facility as work ramps up on Saskatchewan’s newest CO2 subsurface monitoring project. Employees of the Regina-based Petroleum Technology Research Centre (PTRC) are in the process of collecting and analyzing core and log data from an injection well recently drilled here that stretches more than two miles underground and dozens of feet high in an area characterized mostly by pools of fly ash and flat, treeless land stretching in every direction. The data collection is part of PTRC’s new $23 million CO2 monitoring, verification and accounting project called Aquistore. Less than a mile from the Boundary Dam Power Station (but still on SaskPower property), project officials here hope to eventually receive up to 2,000 tons of CO2 per day captured from the plant’s soon to be retrofitted post-combustion capture Unit 3 once complete in early 2013 and inject it deep underground in brine and sandstone formations within the underlying Williston Basin.

In the meantime, though, PTRC researchers will be conducting pilot injection work using water and eventually food-grade CO2 that is set to be trucked onsite. Within the next several weeks, PTRC and its partner organizations plan on drilling an observation well nearby, as well as begin groundwater and soil gas baseline work, project officials said, with the hope that baseline seismic work and small-scale injection operations can begin in early 2013. The goal is to build up to a larger-scale second phase that would begin in early 2014—in concert with when Boundary Dam comes online—and incorporate an integrated CCS project by building a mini pipeline that connect the power station’s Unit 3 with the storage site.

‘Buffer Protection’ for Boundary Dam

In addition to the monitoring work and geologic insights into the Williston Basin that the project will provide, Aquistore has an important role to play with Boundary Dam because of its proximity to the power station and availability to accept CO2 for injection almost immediately, said Mike Monea, president of Carbon Capture and Storage Initiatives at SaskPower. The latter will be able to help the provincially-owned utility do fully-integrated test work for Unit 3 earlier than if it had to rely on its enhanced oil recovery (EOR) offtakers, he said. “We will be in service in 2014, but Unit 3 is going to start up in probably October or November 2013 to do a hot test,” he said. “That’s why we need this Aquistore project in order to take our CO2 so we can ramp our compressors up to 100 percent…we want to make sure very quickly that Unit 3 is running right and that we can deliver a million tons of CO2 a year.”

Jodi Woollam, a spokeswoman for the project at PTRC, said that Aquistore’s proximity to the plant will also give SaskPower “buffer protection” to meet emissions performance standards that are expected to be set by the federal government, particularly if there are any hiccups with its EOR contracts. “We anticipate that SaskPower will be able to supply CO2 to us before their buyers will be in a position to take it for enhanced oil recovery,” she said. “We’re buffer protection because SaskPower starts meeting their [emissions] targets earlier than if they’re continuing to [vent] CO2 into the atmosphere.” Monea said that the project will be particularly useful during those first few months of testing, when likely many of Boundary Dam’s CO2 offtakers for EOR are still in the process of testing the performance of their reservoirs and not ready to accept CO2 for injection. He said it would also be a good “safety valve” if any offtakers need to shut down operations.

Project Attracts $23 Million in Investment to Date

Woollam said that so far roughly $23 million in sponsorship has been secured for the project to date, including $19 million in federal and provincial funding, but PTRC is also seeking more money in order to be able to conduct more robust research onsite. “We see aspects of the monitoring program that we could continue to improve. So as a research firm, that’s obviously our objective is to get more thorough, more hard, accurate evidence. There’s always more that we can do on the science side. Right now that’s what we have, and we’re in search of other sponsors, because as the project incurs cost or expenses, some of that has a liability of not getting done,” Woollam said. She sadded that even though PTRC is looking for more funding, the current budget is substantial. The project had to overcome a significant hurdle last year after its original CO2 supplier, the oil company Consumers Cooperative Refinery Limited, dropped plans for its own $1.9 billion project that would  have added a post-combustion capture unit to one of its oilrigs.

Aquistore will mark a new direction for PTRC in particular as the research group wraps up 12 years of monitoring efforts at the nearby Weyburn-Midale enhanced oil recovery site and shifts its attention to the new project. The Centre plans to release a best practices manual on the project next month.