ESTEVAN - The carbon capture and storage (CCS) facility at SaskPower's Boundary Dam Power Station had its best year to date, capturing a total of 848,388 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) in 2024.
The total smashed the previous record of more than 792,809 tonnes, set in 2016. The facility opened in October 2014 and celebrated its 10-year anniversary last year.
Gregg Milbrandt – the vice-president of energy transition and asset management at SaskPower, who spent nearly 25 years working at coal facilities in Estevan, including a few years as the director of the CCS facility – said a lot of the success at the facility is due to the staff members, who take a lot of pride in the facility and have high levels of ownership.
"It just goes to show the continuous improvement that we've had with the facility. We've focused on, first, obviously, reliability over the course of the years and making improvements along the way with regards to the systems and the processes to ensure that reliability is attained in a productive and efficient way," he said in an interview with Â鶹´«Ã½AV.
SaskPower has also worked on process efficiency to ensure the systems are finely-tuned as much as possible to reach the capacity of the facility and deliver maximum capture.
"I think that's what we've seen over the last number of years now, where we've seen that steady increase, culminating in this last … year with our best 12-month period in 2024," said Milbrandt.
SaskPower has had an internal target of 800,000 tonnes captured for the facility, and it has been attained for the first time.
He's also pleased with the consistency and the reliability, which reflects their investment into both Unit 3 and the capture island.
"We think about the two facilities together, and those are difficult numbers to reach in a sustainable way, and I think we've been able to show that the last number of years that we've been able to run a reliable facility."
Milbrandt said most of the time offline last year was due to a scheduled outage that occurred in September and October. Work completed during the shutdown included cleaning various sections of the CO2 and sulfur dioxide absorber towers; inspecting and cleaning the flue gas cooler; replacing the desiccant in CO2 compressor dehydrator vessels; and various mechanical equipment maintenance on pumps and more.
A much larger scheduled outage is slated for this year. Milbrandt said Unit 3 is to undergo a "major" scheduled outage every 10 years, while the CCS facility has one every five years. The 70-day shutdown is slated to begin in early April and wrap up in early-to-mid June.
During the fourth quarter of 2024, which ran from Oct. 1-Dec. 31, Unit 3 at Boundary Dam was available 78 per cent of the time and the CCS facility was accessible 75 per cent of the month, capturing 172,514 tonnes of CO2. The planned outage accounted for most of the time offline.
While online, the facility had a daily average capture rate of 2,484 tonnes in the fourth quarter, with a peak one-day capture rate of 2,773 tonnes. This resulted in an emissions intensity of 364 tonnes of carbon dioxide per gigawatt hour.
The acid plant was available only 21 per cent of the time in the fourth quarter and produced 421 tonnes of sulfuric acid (SO2) during the three months, but it still produced a record 4,427 tonnes of SO2 for the year.
Milbrandt said there is a particular system within the acid plant that requires some re-engineering.
"There is going to be some work that's going to be taking place during the major overhaul and target on a few of the systems within the acid plant to improve those reliability numbers," said Milbrandt.
Interim repairs are taking place on the acid plant so it can be brought back online for a while before the shutdown.
Sulfuric acid can be used in many industrial applications and be a revenue source for SaskPower.
As of the end of 2024, 6,606,728 tonnes of CO2 have been captured and kept from entering the atmosphere since the facility went online.
