Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
04/27/12
The electricity generator TransAlta Corp. announced late this week that it is abandoning plans to move forward on its $1.4 billion Project Pioneer carbon capture and storage demonstration project originally set for a site 45 miles west Alberta. Nestled towards the bottom of a first-quarter company earnings report, the announcement says TransAlta decided with project partners Capital Power and Enbridge to pull the plug on the post-combustion retrofit project, which had garnered more than $779 million in federal and provincial grants in recent years. TransAlta said it could not secure buyers for the project’s captured CO2—typically used in for enhanced oil recovery operations—and that the price of emissions reductions were “insufficient to allow the project to proceed at this time.” “While we are disappointed that Project Pioneer will not go ahead, we now know the technology works and we still believe there is a future for CCS,” TransAlta President and CEO Dawn Farrell said in the earnings report.
TransAlta had initially planned to bring the project online by 2015 using Alstom’s chilled ammonia post-combustion technology to capture 1 million tons of CO2 annually from an existing 450 MW coal-fired power plant for use in EOR operations and injection into a nearby saline aquifer. A front-end engineering and design (FEED) study conducted in 2010 determined that the project was technologically feasible and that capital costs were on par with previous estimates. The project was one of four large-scale projects selected to receive funding from Alberta’s $2 billion CCS fund, and was subsequently allocated a $430 million slice.
Canadian Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver underscored the federal government’s commitment to CCS technology in an e-mailed statement following the announcement. “We are disappointed that TransAlta’s Project Pioneer will not move forward. However, this is a private sector decision,” he said. “Our government continues to invest in a number of projects that are advancing across the country and we will continue research and development with governments, industry and academia to help advance carbon capture and storage technologies.” Calls to TransAlta, and the Alberta government for comment were not returned as of press time.
