SaskPower tries retrofit route

SHAWN McCARTHY
Globe and Mail
Wednesday, February 27, 2008

OTTAWA — Saskatchewan's provincially owned utility said Wednesday it will spend $758-million, on top of $240-million provided by this week's federal budget, to rebuild an aging power plant into North America's first clean-coal unit that will capture and store carbon dioxide.

Armed with $240-million in federal funding announced in Tuesday's budget, Saskatchewan's Minister for Crown Corporations, Ken Cheveldayoff, said the provincial utility will proceed with a 100-megawatt plant that will capture a million tonnes a year of CO{-2}.

The greenhouse gas will then be piped to nearby oil fields, where it will be injected underground to boost the recovery of crude.

The Saskatchewan project represents a major shift in the search for technology that would allow utilities to burn cheap and plentiful coal without emitting greenhouse gases that cause global warming.

Until recently, companies focused almost exclusively on new gasification plants that separated the carbon dioxide prior to combustion. In this project, SaskPower will rebuild a coal unit at the Boundary site in the southeastern part of the province, extend its life by 30 years and include postcombustion capture technology.

"It's a leading-edge project that, if it works out well, it can be replicated in other plants," Mr. Cheveldayoff said. He added the clean-coal project will allow SaskPower to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 7.2 per cent from 2006 levels.

The Boundary site is near Estevan, where EnCana Corp. already uses carbon dioxide – piped from North Dakota – in an enhanced oil recovery project. The EnCana operation has been widely studied, and scientists believed the CO{-2} injected there will remain trapped for thousands of years.

SaskPower had considered constructing a new, 300-megawatt clean-coal plant that would capture the carbon dioxide prior to combustion but cancelled the project because of rapidly rising costs.

SaskPower president Patricia Youzwa said the demonstration project is a critical step in the commercialization of clean-coal technology.

"By doing a project like this, we'll better understand what the economics are and how the technology performs relative to other alternatives that there may be for reducing greenhouse gas emissions," she said in an interview.

She said SaskPower has not yet chosen the technology that it will use to capture the gases from its flue, though experts say there has recently been progress with ammonia chilled scrubber technology.

The province has committed to sharing the information from its demonstration project with coal-dependent utilities in Alberta and Nova Scotia.

There have been substantial advances in postcombustion clean-coal technology in the past year, and several North American utilities are now considering projects.

David Lewin, senior vice-president with Edmonton-based Epcor Utilities Inc., said the industry will be watching the Saskatchewan project to assess the commercial viability of retrofit carbon-capture.

David Keith, a University of Calgary environmental engineer, said the retrofit technology could be an important tool in the battle against climate change.

But a recent task force on carbon capture and storage, on which Dr. Keith served, recommended that government spend $2-billion to implement the technology throughout Western Canada. This week's budget effort, he said, will leave Canada far short of its goals to reduce emissions.

© The Globe and Mail

Clean coal

James Wood
Saskatchewan News Network
Wednesday, February 27, 2008

REGINA -- With federal money in hand, the Saskatchewan Party government is moving forward with plans for a clean coal carbon sequestration demonstration project.

A day after the federal budget earmarked $240 million to the province for the project, Crown Corporations Minister Ken Cheveldayoff and SaskPower president Pat Youzwa announced plans for a seven-year, $1.4 billion project that involves the retrofit of one of SaskPower's coal-fired power generation units at Boundary Dam near Estevan.

The end result is intended to be the production of 100 megawatts of power with zero greenhouse gas emissions, reducing the Crown corporation's emissions by about one megatonne a year.

Casting a shadow over the project however is SaskPower's last foray into clean coal, which saw a planned new 300-megawatt plant shelved last year, partly because projected costs rose from $1.5 billion to $3.8 billion.

The U.S. government also recently pulled its funding for a clean coal project in Illinois because of cost overruns.

But Cheveldayoff expressed confidence in the financial projections for the new project.

"It's happening immediately. Planning is beginning right away, we're looking at construction starting in 2011. It's happening as soon as possible. We're keeping our finger on the numbers that are out there. This is the best information that we have recognizing the cost escalations that are happening around us and some of that has been built in," he told reporters at the provincial Finance building.

SaskPower will put $758 million into the project on top of the federal funding.

With the plant itself projected to cost $1 billion, the additional $400 million is needed for surrounding infrastructure such as the pipelines for the carbon dioxide.

Cheveldayoff said the government will look to the private sector for the additional funding, with the anticipation that costs will be offset by the sales of carbon dioxide for use in enhanced oil recovery.

Youzwa said the facilities at Boundary Dam would need to be refurbished or replaced in coming years in any case, which the company estimated would cost $800 million without the clean coal component.

The SaskPower president cautioned that the company must still undertake detailed engineering work, choose the technology to clean emissions at the stack and complete discussions with the oil industry on the carbon dioxide sales.

"Until that's completed we won't be ... bringing forward decision items to commit large amounts of capital. The project has to work and make sense both environmentally and economically," she said.

The prospect of a coal-burning plant with minimal greenhouse gas emissions through the capture and storage of carbon dioxide has been a beacon for Saskatchewan governments of all stripes given the province's large coal reserves, its per capita greenhouse gas emissions that lead the country and the prospect of selling the developed technology to other jurisdictions.

NDP Leader Lorne Calvert said he's glad to see the government moving forward with a new clean-coal project but he's concerned about the uncertainty around many aspects, especially the private-sector funding.

There is also a question about the potential for cost escalation given the seven-year timeframe involved, said Calvert, whose government put the $300-megawatt project on the backburner.

"If they haven't even determined now the technology they're going to use, how can they be definitive about the numbers," he said.

The ex-premier noted that if the costs do go up, it's unlikely the federal investment will rise in kind and those increases will likely fall on the province.

The Saskatchewan Party government has committed to keeping the greenhouse gas targets adopted last year by Calvert's government, which included stabilizing emissions by 2010 and cutting them by 32 per cent by 2020.

The projected reduction from the new clean coal project represents a roughly six per cent cut from the province's greenhouse gas emissions in 2005.

While the interest in clean coal and carbon sequestration is growing among governments and industry, it represents a mirage for many environmental groups.

"If the government told SaskPower it needed to reduce its emissions by one megatonne, it could invest probably one-tenth to one-fifth of that amount ($1.4 billion) and get one megatonne of reductions, by investing in efficiencies, by investing in other renewable sources of power," said Dale Marshall, climate change policy analyst with the David Suzuki Foundation.

The costs for Saskatchewan's new project are in fact significantly higher than recent power-generation projects brought on line by SaskPower.

The Centennial Wind Power project, officially commissioned in 2006, cost $250 million and provides 150-megawatts of generation. The planned addition of two natural gas-powered turbines near Kerrobert is estimated to add nearly 100 megawatts at a cost of $150 million.

Cheveldayoff and Youzwa said the government is looking at all options for power generation.

But coal-fired generation represents part of Saskatchewan's "base load power" while wind power faces limitations because it is intermittent, said Cheveldayoff.

Natural gas, while cleaner than regular coal-fired generation, still has significant greenhouse gas emissions.

Bob Stobbs, the chair of the Canadian Clean Power Coalition industry group, said the price for future clean coal projects will come down once a plant is actually up-and-running.

© Canwest News Service 2008