Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
11/13/2015
Completed on time and under budget, the Quest carbon capture and storage project launched on Nov. 6 in Alberta, Canada. The project is the world’s first CCS project on an oil sands upgrader and Canada’s second commercial-scale CCS project, following SaskPower’s Boundary Dam Unit 3 coal-fired power plant, which has been operational for more than a year.
The $1.35 billion (CAD) project is a joint venture of Shell Canada Energy (60 percent), Chevron Canada, (20 percent), and Marathon Oil Canada (20 percent). The governments of Alberta and Canada provided a total of $865 million (CAD) in funding for the project. Quest is a retrofit to Shell’s Scotford upgrader, where oil sands bitumen is converted into synthetic crude. “The launch of the Quest CCS project in Alberta, Canada, is remarkable, as it provides another excellent example of the fact that CCS is about so much more than just coal-fired power,” International Energy Agency Executive Director Fatih Birol said in a release this week. “It can be used in many industrial sectors where no other solutions exist to significantly reduce the CO2 footprint.”
Fluor designed and built the project, using the company’s “3rd Gen Modular Execution” method. A total of 69 separate interlocking models were built and then assembled at the job site, next to the upgrader. “By implementing this technology in the early phases and delivering it throughout the full project execution, we were able to reduce the plot space of the facility by approximately 20 percent and eliminate material and labor costs from the project. This brought additional value to our client and enabled us to complete construction on schedule,” Jim Brittain, president of Fluor’s Energy & Chemicals business in the Americas region, said in a release.
The project is designed to capture 1 million tonnes of CO2 each year for underground storage, the equivalent of one-third of the plant’s emissions. That CO2 will be transported 65 kilometers via pipeline and injected more than 2 kilometers underground. Quest is now operating at commercial-scale after successful testing earlier this year, during which it captured and stored more than 200,000 tonnes of CO2, according to a Shell release.
"Quest represents a significant milestone in the successful design, construction and use of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology on a commercial scale,” Shell CEO Ben van Beurden said in the release. “Quest is a blueprint for future CCS projects globally. Together with government and joint-venture partners, we are sharing the know-how to help make CCS technologies more accessible and cost-effective for the energy industry and other key industrial sectors of the economy.”
The CCS project is likely to be the last in Alberta to receive funding from the provincial government, as the New Democratic Party (NDP), which took power in May, ran on a platform unsupportive of CCS. “We will end the [Progressive Conservatives’] costly and ineffective Carbon Capture and Storage experiment and reinvest the 2015/16 component of this project into construction of public transit, which will help reduce families’ transportation costs and reduce greenhouse gases and other air pollutants,” The NDP platform states.
Through a memorandum of understanding (MOU) signed by the U.S. Department of Energy and Shell Canada in February, monitoring, verification, and accounting (MVA) technology for underground CO2 storage developed by DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) will be tested alongside Shell’s own MVA technology, already installed at the project’s underground storage site, a saline aquifer. According to a DOE press release, the department “is leveraging a federal investment of approximately $3 million in existing and ongoing projects in their research and development program by proposing roughly $500,000 for this collaborative effort.”
