Clean Coal Center of Excellence Finds Its Home in Regina Canada
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David Cameron is the leader of Stantec's Clean Coal Center of Excellence (Photograph by: Don Healy, Leader-Post)
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Buried in last week’s news release that SaskPower had awarded Stantec a $30-million contract to provide consulting engineering services to the $1.2-billion Boundary Dam Integrated Carbon Capture and Storage demonstration project was the announcement that Regina would become home to Stantec’s clean coal center of excellence.
While overshadowed by the latest contract for the world’s first commercial scale carbon capture project at a coal-fired generating station, the center of excellence is no small coup for the Queen City.
It reinforces Regina’s position as a global leader in carbon capture and storage research.
For his part, Stantec CEO and president Bob Gomes hopes to turn this clean coal center of excellence and its staff of 70 into a profit center for the Edmonton-based engineering firm.
At the news conference at SaskPower head office last week, Gomes explained why Stantec picked Regina as its center of excellence.
“This is the first time a project like this (Boundary Dam CCS project) has been done in the world. So, for us, it was an easy decision to create a center of excellence because what you’re doing is being involved in a project that’s never been done before,” Gomes said. “Clearly, that’s giving you the ability of having the staff to work on that, to develop expertise that’s never been developed and take that expertise around the world.’‘
Gomes stressed that the clean coal technology used in the Boundary Dam CCS project will remain the intellectual property of its owner, Cansolv Technologies, a subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell.
But Stantec will have the right, along with the other project partners, like SNCLavalin, Hitachi and, of course, SaskPower, to sell its expertise to other utilities considering clean coal.
“Being involved in a project like this allows you to take this expertise worldwide and to say we’ve done projects like this. But it also allows us to basically take SaskPower with us.”
And Gomes said the market for post-combustion, retrofit CCS technology is “huge,’’ noting that most of the world’s largest economies, like China and the U.S., still use coal as their primary source of electricity generation.
“The U.S. has 300 coal fired power plants that have none of this (clean coal technology) right now,” he said. “Coal is still a very valuable resource as a source of power…So it is clearly something that has the capability of being taken around the world.’‘
With 40 percent of the world’s electricity supply coming from coal-fired generation (50 percent in the U.S. and 80 percent in China), the world needs to find a way of burning coal to produce electricity, without producing CO2 and other greenhouse gases, which are said to contribute to manmade climate change.
“This is what everyone has been looking for,” Gomes said. “Everyone has wanted to see someone take the chance of developing the first commercial project and SaskPower is doing. So this is going to benefit every coal (fired power) plant, not only in North America, but the world.’‘
The person in charge of helping Stantec develop that expertise is David Cameron, senior principal and head of Stantec’s Clean Coal Centre of Excellence at 2010-11th Ave. in downtown Regina.
“We started work (on clean coal technology) with the Canadian Clean Power Coalition in 2002,’’ said Cameron, referring to a consortium of power utilities across Canada, which banded together to find ways of reducing the environmental footprint of coal-burning power plants.
Initially, the coalition looked at ways of cleaning up the flue gases produced by coal burning, and in 2004 explored reducing carbon dioxide emissions produced by coal-fired generating stations. One of the options Cameron and his colleagues looked at was oxyfuel, a technology that promised to remove all GHG and toxic emissions to zero.
In the oxyfuel process, fossil fuels (in this case coal) are combusted in pure oxygen instead of air, which contains nearly 80 per cent nitrogen by volume. If nitrogen is removed from the process, flue gas streams have a much higher concentration of CO2, reducing or eliminating the need for costly CO2 capture.
But oxyfuel was not only commercially unproven technology, it was prohibitively expensive as SaskPower discovered when it looked at oxyfuel for its Shand II power plant. When the estimated bill came in at $3.8 billion and climbing, SaskPower decided to go in a different direction in 2007 — the $1.2-billion Boundary Dam CCS demonstration project. At less than one third the cost of the oxyfuel process, the demonstration CCS project uses post-combustion, retrofit technology to reduce CO2 emissions by one million tons per year - equivalent to taking a quarter of a million vehicles off the road.
“We’ve worked with SaskPower and looked at all the different options,’’ Cameron said. For example, the CCS project, which uses an amine solvent to scrub the CO2 from the flue gases, uses waste heat recovered from the flue gases to help capture the CO2.
“What we do is capture the amine in the CO2 absorber and we pump the amine over to the stripper and . we apply heat. It essentially boils the carbon dioxide off, then it’s compressed and sent off to the oilfields,” Cameron said, pointing to a flow chart of the carbon capture process. “Heat recovery has been used in Europe, but this will be a first for North America.’‘
Cameron added that Stantec engineers are also trying to reduce the parasitic loss of power from the carbon capture process, which typically reduces the plant’s generating capacity by about 20 per cent. For example, the CCS project will reduce the output of Boundary Dam’s 139 megawatt Unit 3 to about 110 MW. “We’re doing something to try to improve the efficiency,’’ Cameron said.
Another advantage of the carbon capture process is that it produces a CO2 stream that can be used to generate revenue through the sale of compressed carbon dioxide to oil and gas companies for enhanced oil recovery projects.
But that also limits the applicability of the carbon capture process in other locations.
“This type of system for capturing carbon dioxide is not going to build at every single coal plant in the world. Where Boundary Dam (power station) is located is an ideal location. Alberta and the northern part of the U.S. will be able to benefit from it as well. In other places, when you have to use it for sequestration (underground storage), it’s going to be more of an economic challenge.”
“But there are lots of places where you can use it.’’
— By Bruce Johnstone, Leader-Post
To stop by Stantec’s website, CLICK HERE
