Today marked the official opening of the Carbon Capture Test Facility (CCTF) at Shand power station, with an attendance of some 70 people from the CSLF meeting being held in Regina, Saskatchewan.

This facility was developed by SaskPower in collaboration with Mitsubishi Hitachi Power Systems. It is designed to allow testing and development of post-combustion capture amine systems for CO2 capture from real flue gas from a coal power plant. The facility is designed to provide a robust evaluation of the collection efficiency, long-term stability, operability, maintainability and reliability of amine-based technologies. The CCTF has the capacity to add and remove process equipment, change the configuration of vessel internals, and expand the hejosirt of the key absorber vessel, currently configured with 18 sampling stations.

IEAGHG attended as part of the CSLF delegation, after a tour of the nearby Boundary Dam CCS project and a visit to the Aquistore CO2 injection site (now receiving and injecting CO2 from Boundary Dam). Aquistore is impressive for many reasons, not least the monitoring programme managed by PTRC which is testing and demonstrating the latest developments in monitoring techniques for CO2 deep geological storage, described by PTRC at the IEAGHG Monitoring Network meeting last week.

The ‘can-do’ attitude of SaskPower was summed up by the slogan on the safety helmet.

What a pleasure to see three CCS projects in a day! Saskatchewan and Canada continue to provide world-leading developments in CCS, sharing with CSLF and the international CCS world. IEAGHG is very pleased that SaskPower will be hosting IEAGHG’s PCCC3 conference in September and revisiting the CCTF as well as Boundary Dam.
For more information see http://www.saskpowerccs.com/ccs-projects/shand-carbon-capture-test-facility/ and http://www.ieaghg.org/conferences/pccc/52-conferences/pccc/470-3rd-post-combustion-capture-conference .