Canada starts sequestering most emissions at a coal power palnt and other carbon capture and storage

Carbon Sequestering 1 million tons in Canada

The world’s first big carbon capture experiment at a coal power plant has begun at a Saskatchewan coal-fired power plant, which will purportedly sequester almost all of its emissions.

This first commercial-scale project will capture about a million tons of carbon a year in the world’s first post-combustion coal-fired CCS project .

Canadian utility SaskPower plans to capture 90 percent of emissions at the 110 megawatt Boundary Dam power station. If this $1.35 billion experiment works, they plan to retrofit the other two units at a cost of 20-30 percent less. Building the technology for the first unit has already revealed ways to make improvements on design and engineering, they say.

There have been industrial scale carbon capture and storage projects.

As at September 2012, the Global CCS Institute identified 75 large-scale integrated projects in its 2012 Global Status of CCS report. 16 of these projects are in operation or in construction capturing around 36 million tonnes of CO2 per annum

World industry and transportation is producing 40 billion tons of CO2 in 2014. So carbon capture and storage needs to be scaled up 1000 times to start balancing the production.

1. In Salah CO2 Injection — Algeria

In Salah is a fully operational onshore gas field with CO2 injection. CO2 is separated from produced gas and reinjected in the producing hydrocarbon reservoir zones. Since 2004, about 1 Mt/a of CO2 has been captured during natural gas extraction and injected into the Krechba geologic formation at a depth of 1,800m. The Krechba formation is expected to store 17Mt CO2 over the life of the project.

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