On May 3 SaskPower released its monthly report on the operation of the Carbon Capture and Storage facility at Boundary Dam Power Station for April, outlining how it was online nearly the whole month, but will be down for maintenance in a few weeks.
The facility was online for 97 per cent of the month of April, going offline for less than a day to address ash buildup in the power plant’s boiler, the company said. The facility captured 56,809 tonnes of carbon dioxide, contributing to the 1,530,368 tonnes captured since inception. As of the end of April, the plan had captured 198,330 tonnes of CO2.
In mid-April, SaskPower installed a full-scale activated carbon treatment test to address amine performance issues. Amine is the principal chemical used to capture carbon dioxide in the system. Initial results show a positive impact. Thermal reclamation of the amine resumed in early April, reducing the level of degradation in the solvent. These positive developments increase the maximum available capacity and the efficiency of the process. Optimizing the maintenance costs of the amine solution will continue to result in reduced CO2 capture rate until the completion of the upcoming outage.
This was evident as the daily average of carbon dioxide captured has remained flat for the last three months at just under 2,000 tonnes per day. The 12 month average is 2,322 tonnes per day.
A longer outage is planned for June 2017 to address routine maintenance at the Boundary Dam Unit 3 power unit, clean and inspect the carbon capture facility and apply a number of new technical and mechanical fixes that will further improve efficiency and reliability, SaskPower concluded.
