ESTEVAN - During the third quarter of 2022, from July 1-Sept. 30, SaskPower’s CCS facility at the Boundary Dam was available 94.5 per cent of the time, capturing 219,750 tonnes of carbon dioxide.
While online, the facility had a daily average capture rate of 2,500 tonnes, with a peak one-day capture of 2,742 tonnes.
The numbers were released by the Crown corporation on Tuesday.
“This strong performance resulted in an emissions intensity of 436 tonnes of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour (CO2/MWh), well within the federal carbon tax threshold of 549 tonnes CO2/MWh,” SaskPower said in a news release.
Unit 3 at Boundary Dam was available 99.5 per cent of the time over the second quarter. BD3 can be online when the CCS facility is not operating, but the CCS facility needed Unit 3 to be functioning.
The second quarter of this year also marked the second straight three-month stretch in which at least 200,000 tonnes of CO2 were captured.
The acid plant at Boundary Dam was available 80.4 per cent of the time during the most recent quarter, resulting in 1,469.7 tonnes of sulfuric acid produced, significantly exceeding targets and setting a new quarterly record, according to SaskPower. Sulfuric acid has numerous potential industrial uses for SaskPower and can be sold as a revenue source for the company.
SaskPower noted the CCS facility will be down for a two-week planned maintenance outage in mid-October.
Since Unit 3 went online in October 2014, a little more than 4.8 million tonnes of CO2 have been blocked from entering the Earth’s atmosphere, as of Sept. 30. That works out to about 600,000 tonnes of CO2 per year.
In the first nine months of this year, the CCS facility has captured 556,332 tonnes of CO2.
