Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
8/29/2014
Work on the Quest CCS project in the Canadian province of Alberta is now 70 percent complete, with the last of the project’s 69 modules recently put in place, Shell Canada announced this week. Further, the project remains on schedule and on budget, a feat that can be attributed in part to the construction design, Quest Project Lead Tim Wiwchar told GHG Monitor this week. “These days it’s been a challenge, but I’d have to say that our construction strategy has helped, the module fabrication has been key and I think it also is a good indicator that what we’re building here is proven technologies. It’s not like we’re building things from scratch, we do have experience in this,” Wiwchar said.
Quest has been under construction since September 2012 and is scheduled to be fully operational next year. The project is a retrofit of capture technology onto Shell’s existing Scotford oil sands upgrader near Edmonton, Alberta. The modules were produced by engineering company KBR offsite in Edmonton while the capture unit itself was designed using Fluor’s 3rd Gen Modular ExecutionSM technology. When completed, the project will remove an estimated 1 million tonnes of CO2 annually from the bitumen upgrader and transport it nearly 40 miles north to a storage site. It is projected that the project can run at this capacity for 25 years.
Work Moving to Connecting Modules
The remainder of work to be done at the plant is more detailed and involves connecting all of the modules. “It has taken quite a team of folks between KBR and Fluor to get that in place, particularly trying to fit this little Lego puzzle together. But now is the real detailed task of making all the connections because there’s piping connections, there’s equipment connections, there’s electrical connections and instrumentation. A lot of the work still remains yet to come but the bulk construction is more or less complete,” Wiwchar said. Those connections should be completed by the first quarter of 2015. “Once that’s complete what we do is we go through the commissioning phase which is when we start to fill the equipment with fluids and test the safety features of the equipment. Then we hit the start-up phase in the second half of next year,” he said.
Work continues on the remainder of the project, consisting of the pipeline and injection wells. Mechanical completion of the nearly 40-mile underground pipeline is expected for this fall. Baseline testing at the well pads will begin in tandem with the commissioning process of the plant. “The real testing at the well pads won’t occur until we’re injecting through the commissioning and startup so that’s going to be more into the second half of next year,” Wiwchar said.
