SaskPower placed three companies on its list for its carbon capture project at the Boundary Dam Power Station near Estevan.
The crown corporation selected Powerspan Corp., Cansolv Technologies Inc. and Fluor Canada Ltd. to proceed to the next stage, after issuing a request for proposals last July.
“The technologies that were selected present the lowest cost and risk for C02 capture and are best suited to our demonstration project,” said Mike Monea, vice-president of integrated carbon capture and sequestration.
The project, also described as clean coal, is expected to cost about $1.4 billion. The federal government has contributed $240 million and the province will spend $758 million. Other funds are expected to come from industry.
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The work will involve rebuilding the dam’s Unit 3 with carbon capture technology, which is expected to extend the unit’s life by 30 years. The stored carbon dioxide would be used in enhanced oil recovery.
The 100 megawatt project is expected to be fully operational in 2015 and capture one million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year.
The three companies now on the short list will provide detailed project designs, cost estimates and risk profiles and SaskPower will select a technology by the end of this year.
Powerspan Corp., based in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, was founded in 1994 as Zero Emissions Technology Inc. and is developing a capture technology called ECO2. This technology is based on electro-catalytic oxidation, which the company developed in the 1990s and has tested in the United States.
Cansolv Technologies Inc. was formed in 1997 to commercialize a sulfur dioxide scrubbing system. The company has offices in Montreal and China, and last November was purchased by Shell Global Solutions International.
The third candidate, Fluor Canada, is based in Calgary and has been in operation since 1949.
It has extensive experience in various industrial sectors, including power generation and co-generation.
