SASKPOWER TAKES BOUNDARY DAM UNIT OFFLINE FOR RETROFIT WORK

Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
3/1/13

SaskPower took Unit 3 of its Boundary Dam Power Station offline Feb. 25 in order to retrofit the power generating unit for its flagship 110 MW carbon capture and storage demonstration project. After cooling off the decades-old system and taking it apart, the provincially-owned utility will begin rebuilding the power island with a new boiler, turbine and control system over the next five months, according to Mike Monea, president of Carbon Capture and Storage Initiatives at SaskPower. “This milestone is truly showing the march of time on our project,” he said in an interview this week. “The shutdown of BD-3 means we’re getting ready to give her a heart transplant. In about 150 days the plant will be turned back on to start generating power.”

In addition to the power island retrofit work, Monea said that construction on the capture side of the project is ongoing and about 70 percent complete. A crew of about 800 workers will begin preparing both systems for integration in the upcoming months ahead of hot testing slated to begin in October, he added. From there, engineers can optimize the $1.24 billion system’s performance for several months ahead of commercial operations in April 2014. In the meantime, the five other electric generating units at the Boundary Dam plant will continue to run, Monea said. 

Pipeline Work to Begin Soon

SaskPower said it will also soon begin construction of a two-and-a-half mile-long CO2 pipeline that will run to the Petroleum Technology Research Centre’s $23 million Aquistore project on the edge of Boundary Dam property. The pipeline will continue onwards to a hand-off point where CO2 offtaker Cenovus Energy’s pipeline will collect the one million tonnes of CO2 annually produced at BD-3 for enhanced oil recovery operations about 40 miles away near Weyburn, Saskatchewan.