Canada inaugurates first large-scale commercial coal CCS plant

• 10 years ago (2014-10-24)
• Junior Isles

Asia 892 North America 1021

---

Canada has officially inaugurated the 110 MW Boundary Dam coal-fired plant, the first large-scale commercial coal plant to fitted carbon with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology.

The project was held up by the coal industry as a real-life example that it is possible to go on burning the dirtiest of fossil fuels while avoiding dangerous global warming.

Saskatchewan's state-owned electricity provider SaskPower International was due to open the C$1.3 billion plant publicly late this week, but has revealed that it successfully went live earlier than expected.

The plant promises to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 90 per cent, reducing greenhouse gas emissions by about 1 million tons a year, relative to a conventional plant.

The captured CO2 at Boundary Dam will primarily be sold to the nearby Cenovus oil company for use in priming its oil fields, with the remainder buried in geological formations.

The IPPC stated last year that without broad deployment of CCS technology most of the world's fossil fuel will have to stay in the ground to avoid dangerous climate change.

It is with this in mind that Brad Page, chief executive of the Global CCS Institute, has said that the opening of the Boundary Dam plant is “… an incredibly important event from our perspective,” though he was reluctant to predict rapid deployment of Boundary Dam’s technology on a large-scale.

He noted that Boundary Dam’s reliance on a local source of coal and ability to sell the captured CO2 to the oil industry meant its model was something of an economic special case, with conversion and operation costs lower than other coal plants.

Ian Yeates, the SaskPower executive in charge of CCS, also acknowledged the uniqueness of the Boundary Dam operation. “I think at this stage of the game, because the concept is so new, having a revenue stream from the CO2 is critical to help the economics. But I think eventually that will not be required,” he stated.

Many previous CCS projects have faced long delays, cost overruns, and relied on generous government subsidies. In Mississippi, Southern Company spent more than $5.5 billion bringing its new-build CCS project, the Kemper County Energy Facility, to operational status. After six years of work, its opening has been delayed again until mid-2015.

Boundary Dam itself received around C$240 million in subsidies, but the operators claim any delays and cost overruns have been down to issues with the old plant, not the CCS technology.

Yeates has stated that SaskPower has already seen a lot of interest in the CCS plant from China, India and other nations with large quantities of similar lignite coal.