ESTEVAN - March was the best month in nearly a year for the carbon capture and storage facility at SaskPower’s Boundary Dam Power Station.
The CCS facility was online for 99.1 per cent of the time, and captured 72,290 tonnes of carbon dioxide.
The last time the facility had numbers that high came in May 2021, when it was online 99.5 per cent of the time and it prevented 72,236 tonnes of CO2 from entering the atmosphere.
In the previous 12 months, the facility was online for 40.4 per cent of the time, and captured an average of 30,642 tonnes of CO2 per month. It went through a scheduled shutdown last June and July, and shortly after it came back online, it encountered multiple issues, including a compressor motor failure that took it offline for more than two months.
The average daily capture when CCS was online was 2,364 tonnes per day with a peak one-day capture of 2,982 tonnes.
In the first three months of the year, the CCS facility captured 118,042 tonnes of CO2. Since it came online in October 2014, it has kept 4,370,715 tonnes of CO2 from entering the atmosphere.
Also last month, CCS performed a full injectivity test at the Aquistore injection well, working alongside the Petroleum Technology Research Centre to collect useful data about the deep geological storage of CO2.
