Canadian Environment and Climate Change Minister Catherine McKenna plans to visit the Boundary Dam Unit 3 carbon capture and storage project in Saskatchewan. Speaking with Bloomberg, the minister said she would head to the province as early as next month.
Boundary Dam is a first-of-its-kind commercial-scale carbon capture and storage retrofit on an existing coal-fired power plant. The project had some difficulty in the first year of operation, launching in October 2014, during which it did not perform as advertised, capturing less carbon than hoped. However, after a maintenance period, the plant has been performing well since the beginning of the year, project owner SaskPower has reported.
According to SaskPower data, the plant was operational through all of March and was in operation for 82 of the first 91 days of the year. It was brought off-line in February for planned maintenance. “A total of 83,497 tonnes of carbon dioxide were captured in March, for a combined 217,000 tonnes captured so far this year. The process is well on its way to meeting its 2016 target of 800,000 tonnes,” the company said.
In 2014, the plant in Saskatchewan captured 115,000 metric tons of CO2 from October, when it was brought online, to the end of the year. In 2015, the facility captured 425,000 metric tons of CO2.
