Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
5/8/2015
Electricity generator TransAlta Corp. signaled late last week that it may take another stab at a carbon capture and storage demonstration. The company had abandoned plans for the $1.4 billion Project Pioneer CCS demonstration project in April 2012 citing trouble finding a buyer for the project’s CO2. “Our development team is also working on a carbon capture and storage conversion project for coal, and that would be something that would be complementary to a strategy of converting our plants,” TransAlta CEO Dawn Farrell said during the company’s annual meeting.
TransAlta also released its 2014 Sustainability report last week that calls out CCS as an important technology to lengthen the useful lifetime of its coal fleet. “Our company will continue to play a key role in the larger transition of Alberta’s electricity sector from coal-fired generation to less carbon intensive electricity production, and we have many strategic options available to us as we work to continue to meet federal and provincial environmental regulations. Some of these options include investing in life-extensions for our coal plants (such as through carbon capture and storage retrofits), converting baseload coal plants to low-cost gas peakers or investing in additional renewable generation in the province,” the report says.
Life and Death of Pioneer
TransAlta’s Project Pioneer CCS Demonstration project was originally set for a site in the Canadian province of Alberta. Had the project moved forward as intended, the post-combustion retrofit would have come on-line this year. Pioneer would have utilized 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. If TransAlta moves forward with a new CCS project, however, funding may be harder to find due to this week’s election of a New Democratic Party government in the province. The NDP stated in its platform that they would close the CCS fund.
