Post Combustion CO2 Capture Retrofit of Saskpower's Shand Power Station: Capital and Operating Cost Reduction of a 2nd Generation Capture Facility

SaskPower’s Integrated Carbon Capture and Storage Demonstration Project on Boundary Dam’s Unit 3 pioneered the way for full-scale carbon capture facilities around the world. With such an undertaking, many lessons were learned through the design, construction and operations of the facility. These lessons have resulted in novel optimizations, operating methods and overall learnings for the facility and its role as a power generator in the power utility. Saskatchewan and its provincial utility, SaskPower, again find themselves on the cusp of an important decision. The utility has a need to provide base-load power which regionally is only available from coal or natural gas. Regulations in Canada are closing the window on coal-fired power generation without carbon capture, and while there is a significant revenue opportunity to utilize and sequester CO2 for Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) operations, low oil prices have softened the demand for the CO2. The economics of retrofitting coal with Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) are further challenged by locally all-time low natural gas prices. The International CCS Knowledge Centre (Knowledge Centre) is currently executing a feasibility study with SaskPower to determine if a business case can be made for a post combustion carbon capture retrofit of the 305MW Shand Power Station. The study included the addition of a 90% carbon capture facility that will have a nominal annual capacity of 2 million tonnes per year. This paper includes interpretation of the public and non-confidential portion of this study to highlight both the overall impact on the cost of CO2 capture, as well as contrasting the impact of the major design modifications with the Boundary Dam Unit 3 system (BD3).