SASKPOWER ANNOUNCES KNOWLEDGE-SHARING INDUSTRY CONSORTIUM

Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
1/11/13

Further banking on its budding image as an early leader in carbon capture and storage development, SaskPower launched an industry consortium this week aimed at sharing lessons learned from its Boundary Dam project. For a fee, members of the SaskPower CCS Global Consortium can gain access to the technology selection, financing, construction, risk and regulatory knowledge gained by the utility during the development of its $1.24 billion flagship CCS project, SaskPower said. “With all the knowledge we’ve gathered, we think we have drastic cost-savings for the next plant that we will build,” Mike Monea, president of CCS Initiatives at SaskPower, said in an interview with GHG Monitor. “We also want to share a lot of our learnings with industry and government.” A prospectus for the consortium said the forum would create a “conduit” for the transfer of CCS expertise and that SaskPower’s experience with Boundary Dam could help inform future projects. 

Monea said SaskPower will look to spend the money earned from membership fees on continued CCS research and public acceptance efforts around the world. Research organizations will be able to apply for funding from SaskPower, he added. “We have expressions of interest globally and we want to make sure that we also engage different research facilities around the world to help advance this new technology,” Monea said.

The post-combustion capture retrofit on Boundary Dam’s 110 MW Unit 3 is expected to be the world’s first power generating unit with CCS to come into operation in spring 2014. Construction at the southeast Saskatchewan facility is expected to wrap up later this year, with a hot test period slated to begin in October. The utility recently secured a 10-year off-take agreement with Cenovus Energy for all one million tons of CO2 that will be produced at the facility annually. 

SaskPower Also Pursuing Capture Test Center

The knowledge consortium is the most recent way SaskPower is looking to take advantage of its image as a first mover on CCS. The utility last spring announced the launch of a $600 million carbon capture test facility at its Shand power station in southeast Saskatchewan with Hitachi, Ltd. Vendors of carbon capture systems can test their technologies there on a live flue gas stream under power plant conditions. It is one of less than a handful of similar facilities operating worldwide.