Millionth tonne captured at Boundary Dam during IEAGHG International Summer School

Congratulations to SaskPower for capturing their millionth tonne of CO₂ yesterday, during the IEAGHG International CCS Summer School visit.

Fifty students from over 17 countries visited SaskPower's Boundary Dam project yesterday, coinciding with the capture of their millionth tonne. The students had been hearing from SaskPower about many aspects of Boundary Dam project and about the monitoring at Aquistore from PTRC during the Summer School. A good range questions were asked by the students, who come from a range of disciplines, some already becoming expert in aspects of post-combustion capture. "This validates the work we are all doing on CCS, across all aspects" said Hannah Rose Schonwald of Arizona State University.

As well as the technology in the capture plant, students were shown how electricity is generated by the power plant's unit 6. The students were then taken to see the Aquistore site, where an extensive monitoring development and testing programme is being managed by PTRC for the 75,000 tonnes of the CO₂ has been injected into a deep saline formation for permanent storage. It was especially interesting to see first-hand the fibre optic distributed acoustic sensor and geophone arrays after having heard of their comparison results during the IEAGHG Monitoring Network meeting in Edinburgh two weeks ago. The field trip concluded with a visit to the Capture Test Facility at Shand power plant.

The International CCS Summer School is now in its tenth year, so it was rather special to mark this anniversary with a visit to this world leading project, and then an added bonus to coincide with the significant milestone in CO₂ captured. The Summer School is being hosted by BHP Billiton / SaskPower International CCS Knowledge Centre in Regina.