Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
7/24/2015
After more than 500 hours of operation, the CO2 Solutions carbon capture demonstration project at Salaberry-de-Valleyfield, near Montreal, Québec, remains on target to meet performance expectations, the company said in a press release last week. The project has been operational since June 19 and is expected to conclude its initial 1,000 hours of pilot testing by the end of the month. “We are very pleased with the way our demonstration unit is operating,” Louis Fradette, CO2 Solutions’ chief technology officer, said in the release. “Following a standard start-up period used to optimize system performance, we easily passed the 500-hour mark capturing CO2 at design capacity. We believe this performance confirms the potential of the technology for low-cost, environmentally friendly application at larger scale.”
The project has gone through many changes since its inception. CO2 Solutions initially tested its enzyme-enabled carbon capture technology at the University of North Dakota’s Energy & Environmental Research Center (EERC). Due to better than expected test results at EERC, the company moved its timeline for demonstration forward. The project was originally slated to run for 2,500 hours at Husky Energy’s Pikes Peak South, Saskatchewan, heavy-oil site. In May, the company began testing at Valleyfield before making the move to the Husky Energy site.
However, the company has now decided to perform all testing in Valleyfield. “CO2 Solutions has decided that it is preferable not to incur the added expense and time required to relocate the demonstration unit to Saskatchewan for completion of the total scheduled 2,500 hours of testing, as originally planned, and Husky Energy has agreed to this change. This was made possible as conditions at the Valleyfield operation mirror those that would be found at Husky’s Pikes Peak South heavy oil site in Saskatchewan,” according to the release
Initial test results from the EERC pilot found that the company’s technology could run on an estimated $39 per tonne of CO2 based on 90 percent capture rate, including CO2 compression to 2,250 psi. Furthermore, the testing found an approximately 10-times reduction in the parasitic load on the power plant, stable performance of the enzyme with no need for replacement, no toxic waste generation, and the potential for significantly reduced power plant retrofit costs.