It’s taken a decade and a half, but Saskatchewan has put together the pieces necessary for a comprehensive strategy for carbon capture and storage. The implications for this could be massive, not only for Saskatchewan, and Canada, but the world.
Fifteen years ago the Weyburn-Midale project started using carbon dioxide collected from the Dakota Gasification plant at Beulah, N.D., for enhanced oil recovery. Pumping CO2 underground at high pressure in what is known as a miscible flood results in the carbon dioxide acting like a solvent. It washes oil from the reservoir rock. This tertiary form of oil recovery has already greatly extended the life of an oilfield first drilled in the 1960s and expected to be dry long ago. When EOR recovery efforts are over, the CO2 used will be left underground, presumably forever. The International Energy Agency did extensive scientific work on this front to establish it should do exactly that. Thus, we have the “storage component.”
As for carbon capture, last fall saw the opening of the Boundary Dam Integrated Carbon Capture and Storage Project. It is the first commercial-scale capture plant of its type in the world. The capture portion of it was about $1 billion, out of a total $1.467 billion. They are still working some of the kinks out of it, but it has already successfully captured hundreds of thousands of tonnes of CO2 and pumped it down the 70 kilometre pipeline to the Cenovus-operated Weyburn unit.
But not all point sources of carbon dioxide have the benefit of a nearby depleted oilfield into which they can dispose captured CO2. In May we saw the ribbon-cutting for the Aquistore project, which is injecting Boundary Dam-supplied CO2 into deep saline aquifers. These aquifers are much more prevalent throughout the world, and would provide repositories for captured carbon dioxide for a much broader range of locations. Aquistore is worth $30 million.
While Boundary Dam is the first generation of large-scale capture facilities, SaskPower and Mitsubishi Hitachi Power Systems are already working on the next. The key element is the amines, the chemical used to capture the CO2 in large scale plants. In late June the grand opening was held for the Shand Carbon Capture Test Facility, a $70 million project to test the next generation of amines.
Other work over the years done in Saskatchewan has included the lab-bench scale International Test Centre for Carbon Capture, now called the Laboratory for Carbon Capture and Low-Carbon Energy Research. While it is now defunct, the International Performance Assessment Centre for the Geologic Storage of carbon dioxide (IPAC-CO2) was established to develop standards that could be applied not just in Canada, but globally, for measuring CO2 stored underground and attributing credits for it.
The Petroleum Technology Research Centre (PTRC) has been a key player in many of these developments, including the science portion of the Weyburn-Midale project and Aquistore.
What it comes down to is this: we not only know how to capture carbon dioxide, move it someplace else, store it forever and even make money while doing it, we are actually accomplishing all the above. While others speak until they are blue in the face about emissions reductions targets, we have been actually doing something about it. Coal and oil are not going away any time soon, and China is continuing to build coal plants at a rapid pace. These numerous strategies allow the world to continue using fossil fuels and largely mitigate, not just reduce, the impact.
Instead of lecturing Saskatchewan, and Canada, maybe some other countries should follow our lead.
