A Carbon-Capture Debacle in Saskatchewan Raises More Questions About a Technology That Isn’t Living Up to the Hype

The trouble engulfing SaskPower over its Boundary Dam carbon capture and storage plant in southern Saskatchewan comes with far-reaching implications that stand to affect the future of this questionable technology.

When the coal-fired 140 megawatt Boundary Dam power station—outfitted with a carbon capture and storage (CCS) plant  officially opened in early October 2014, it drew extensive and overwhelmingly credulous media coverage.

Pro-coal politicians, coal companies and some utilities pointed to the US$1 billion (C$1.4bn) project as evidence that coal power had a rosy future in a carbon-constrained world. In the year since the plant was commissioned, SaskPower has spent a small fortune hyping the project. Earlier this year CBC News revealed that the president of SaskPower’s carbon capture and storage division, Mike Monea, had racked up travel-related expenses of over US$299,000 (C$396,000) in four years. The company and its sponsors are at the global climate summit in Paris now promoting the technology.

In November, however, SaskPower’s carefully-crafted packaging of the CCS plant as a success story was brought into question by leaked documents that told a different story. The plant, it turns out, has managed to capture less than half the 90 per cent of the carbon dioxide its promoters said it would contain from the power station’s emissions, and glitches have shut it down time and again.

The blowback has been notable including headlines like this: “SaskPower Carbon Capture Project a Billion Dollar Bizarro-World Boondoggle.”

Yet the campaign for CCS continues, even as embarrassing results like those at Boundary Dam pose awkward questions for the global coal lobby. In February, the World Coal Association proclaimed CCS technology “a reality, as evidenced by the Boundary Dam coal-fired power station in Canada,” and said that the “pioneering project” would prove the technology viable and help sustain a battered coal industry. The Boundary Dam project was also embraced very publicly in mid-September by BHP Billiton—the world’s largest mining company and one of the largest coal producers and exporters—when BHP announced it would fund a SaskPower “knowledge centre” to share “access to the data, information and lessons learned from SaskPower’s Boundary Dam facility.”

Lessons indeed.

Promoting CCS has long been a mainstay of the global coal industry’s argument that it is possible to simultaneously build new coal-fired electricity plants and cut greenhouse gas emissions.

The Boundary Dam project belies that assertion—and it’s not the only case against the myth of CCS. A recent study by the University of Michigan has concluded that CSS technology is unviable if only because it is prohibitively expensive. The Associated Press just this month—under the headline ‘‘Clean Coal’ Technology Fails to Capture World’s Attention’—chronicled how a similarly infamous project in Mississippi, the costly Kemper CCS plant, has failed. That article includes this scathing line: “Even some of those who supported the plant have turned against it, advising others to think long and hard before trying something similar.”

Carbon capture, in short, remains a pipe dream. It is not feasible in the new energy economy, and it won’t save the coal industry.

Bob Burton is the editor of CoalWire.