Alstom, TransAlta Form Canadian Partnerships for Large-Scale CCS Demo

The Pioneer Project—a long-awaited large-scale carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS) demonstration facility—last week got a boost as French industrial giant Alstom and Canada’s largest investor-owned power group, TransAlta, partnered with the governments of Canada and Alberta to build the plant at a coal-fired generation station in Canada.

Project Pioneer will be located at the 450-MW Keephills 3 power plant, a joint venture between TransAlta and Capital Power. The supercritical coal-fired power plant is to be built adjacent to the existing Keephills power plant in Wabamun, Alberta, near Edmonton.

It will use Alstom’s proprietary chilled ammonia process to capture approximately 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, Alstom said in a release last week. It is expected to be the first project in the world that will capture and store carbon at this magnitude, as well as the first to have its own integrated underground storage system. The project is one of the last major steps required by Alstom prior to commercial availability from 2015 onward.
 
Canada’s federal government, which recently expressed significant backing for projects advancing CCS technologies, will contribute C$343 million to the project. Alberta, meanwhile, signed a letter of intent with Calgary-based TransAlta to invest C$431 million over 15 years, and it has also pledged to cover engineering and design costs estimated at C$5 million, according to Bloomberg.

Last week, as reported by POWERnews, the Canadian and Alberta governments signed a letter of intent for C$865 million in provincial and federal funding for a CCS project at Royal Dutch Shell’s Scotford refinery and upgrader in Alberta.

Sources: Alstom, TransAlta, Bloomberg