Canadian Government Funds Eights Private Sector CCS Projects

The Canadian government last week said it would inject up to C$140 million (US$111 million) into eight private sector projects that have proposed to research, develop, and demonstrate carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies.

The funding will be provided through the C$230 million (US$183 million) ecoENERGY Technology initiative, which was launched in 2007 to support an increase in Canada’s supply of clean energy. The eight proposals were submitted by partnerships led or co-led by ARC Resources, Enhance Energy, Spectra Energy Transmission, TransCanada, TransAlta, Husky, Enbridge, and EPCOR.

Minister of Natural Resources Lisa Raitt met with the CEOs of these companies last week along with representatives from Western Canadian provinces British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan to establish a network that will share research and expertise in developing and demonstrating CCS technologies.

The Canadian government will now invite the project proponents to begin negotiations toward formal contribution agreements to set the conditions under which funding will be delivered. The funding amounts are expected to range from C$3 million to C$30 million (US$2.3 million to US$23.8 million) for each project.

The eight proposals are:

Pioneer Project
Pioneer is a large-scale CCS project proposed for the Keephills Thermal Electric Power Generation Plant, a coal-fired facility near Edmonton, Alberta. TransAlta is proposing to build the facility. It will perform several functions: integrate leading-edge, post-combustion, chilled ammonia capture technology with a power plant to capture one megaton per year of CO₂; transport the CO₂ for use in enhanced oil recovery and to a permanent geological storage site; demonstrate safe, secure, large-scale permanent storage in saline aquifers; and deliver significant reductions in CO₂ emissions by 2012.

Belle Plaine Integrated Polygeneration CCS Project
This project, led by TransCanada, proposes to conduct pre–front end engineering and design and other work as a prerequisite to a decision to go forward with a C$5 billion (US$3.97 billion) project to build and commission a polygeneration facility in Belle Plaine, Saskatchewan. If the facility is constructed, large volumes of petcoke (a low-value product of heavy oil upgrading) would be gasified and used to produce a number of products, including hydrogen, steam, and sulfur, and to generate up to 500 MW in electricity to potentially displace aging coal-fired generation stations in Saskatchewan. Process CO₂ would also be used by two large fertilizer plants located near the proposed polygeneration facility.

Reductions in CO₂ emissions would result from capturing and sequestering 80% to 90% of the CO₂ from the polygeneration facility as well as from offsetting the use of natural gas to produce hydrogen and steam at the fertilizer plants. Captured CO₂ would be sequestered at enhanced oil recovery sites and in saline aquifers in southeastern Saskatchewan.

Heartland Area Redwater Project (HARP)
This project, led by ARC Resources, is designed to demonstrate the feasibility of safe CO₂ storage in the Redwater Leduc Reef, situated northeast of Edmonton, Alberta. This site is located close to the Alberta Industrial Heartland region, where a number of large industrial sources of greenhouse gas emissions—including chemical and fertilizer plants and several oil sands upgraders—are operating, being built, or in the planning stages.

The Redwater Leduc Reef is also strategically located along a straight-line path between Fort McMurray (the center of tar sands mining) and Edmonton, a potential route for a CO₂ pipeline from Fort McMurray. Preliminary work estimates the total storage capacity of the saline aquifer portion of the reef to be one gigaton of CO₂ . Over the long term, this project will demonstrate CCS on a commercial scale (several million tons per year).

Integrated Carbon Capture and Enhanced Oil Recovery
Led by Enhance Energy, this project involves the capture of CO₂ emissions from industrial sites in the Alberta Industrial Heartland. The captured CO₂ will be transported to mature oil reservoirs in central Alberta, where it will be injected for enhanced oil recovery purposes and permanent sequestration. The project will capture CO₂ from two sources: a large fertilizer plant and an oil sands upgrading operation (awaiting construction) in order to demonstrate the feasibility of a single network to collect CO₂ from a large number of industrial emitters.

Fort Nelson Exploratory Project
Spectra Energy Transmission’s project represents the first phase of research toward a “world-scale” CCS project associated with Spectra Energy’s existing gas processing plant in Fort Nelson, B.C. Raw natural gas contains high levels of CO₂ , which processing strips away. If the process is proven feasible, the CO₂ would be compressed, dehydrated, cooled into a concentrated stream, and then injected into deep saline formations more than two kilometers underground for permanent sequestration. This project is designed to demonstrate the technical feasibility of injecting large volumes of sour CO₂ into deep saline formations for permanent storage. In the long term, it could lead to a reduction of 1.3 to 1.6 megatons of CO₂ per year.

CO₂ Injection in Heavy Oil Reservoirs
This project, led by Husky Energy Inc., will focus on targeted R&D activities to develop new knowledge and methods for enhanced oil recovery in heavy oil reservoirs, using injected CO₂ that could be permanently stored in the reservoirs—a new approach in heavy oil extraction. This work will help lead to the capture of CO₂ from Husky’s upgrader and ethanol plant and transport and inject it into heavy oil reservoirs located adjacent to the upgrader to enhance oil recovery.

This project could lead to the collection of 300,000 tons of CO₂ per year from the Husky Upgrader and ethanol plant by purifying, dehydrating, compressing, and transporting the CO₂ to a heavy oil reservoir in the Lloydminster, Saskatchewan, area.

Alberta Saline Aquifer Project (ASAP) / Genesee Post-Combustion Demonstration Plant
Enbridge and EPCOR will conduct separate projects, but they are designed to integrate with one another.

EPCOR’s Genesee Post-Combustion Demonstration Plant involves the construction of a demonstration facility that will capture CO₂ from a greenfield coal-fired power plant (150 MW net) in Alberta. The captured CO₂ will be transported through collaboration with Enbridge and the Alberta Saline Aquifer Project (ASAP).

Enbridge will be designing the pipeline route for transporting the CO₂ as well as the CO₂ injection facilities. The company will also conduct pilot injections to test the characteristics of the proposed storage site to optimize the project’s operation. The CO₂ will be used for enhanced oil recovery operations or sequestered in a saline formation located within 100 km of Genesee. ASAP is also responsible for measuring and monitoring the CO2 that will be stored in the saline aquifer. The Genesee plant would commence operation in 2015, capturing 3,000 tons of CO₂ per day, or nearly one million tons per year.

Source: Canadian Ministry of Natural Resources