The Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) facility at Boundary Dam Power Station resumed commercial operations on Sept. 2, following a shutdown that lasted more than three months.
Since that time, the CCS facility has been operating continually, and the availability was 94 per cent for the month of September. The 12-month average for operating time is 69 per cent, although that number has been affected by the prolonged shutdown.
Since it resumed operations, the facility captured 71,878 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) for a total of 1,668,878 tonnes captured since inception.
The 12-month average for CO2 captured at the plant is 43,490 tonnes per month, but again, that figure would be affected by the work that took place at Boundary Dam from June to August.
During September, the process was being prepared for reliability and performance testing. The upgrades made to the facility during the previous outage were checked, tuned and verified, with the plant reaching a maximum daily production output of 3,080 tonnes.
Boundary Dam produced a little less than 120 megawatts of power last month, compared to the 12-month average of 107 megawatts.
Due to the length of the planned outage, Aquistore, the deep well injection facility, will require conditioning before maximum injection rates of carbon dioxide can be achieved. Having Aquistore accept high injection rates will be a requirement for the CCS plant to achieve maximum production.
This process takes time to achieve and continued into early October.
Optimization of the plant’s performance will continue into October until the plant can be tuned to maximize performance.
