Brian Zinchuk is editor and owner of Pipeline Online
Bringing up the elephant in the room
In late January, Crown Investments Corp. Minister Jeremy Harrison announced that SaskPower would begin the process of technology selection for large, 1,000 megawatt-scale reactors.
That’s a fancy way of saying Saskatchewan is in the market to pick a big reactor design and quite possibly build them.
Pipeline Online will be digging deep into this, which could be the most expensive and consequential decision the Government of Saskatchewan makes in decades.
Two models in particular are under consideration. One is the CANDU Monark. In 2011, the Government of Canada under Stephen Harper sold the Crown corporation Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) and the intellectual property license of the Canadian designed CANDU reactor to Quebec engineering firm SNC-Lavalin. In 2023 SNC-Lavalin changed its name to AtkinsRéalis.
The second model is the US-designed Westinghouse AP1000 reactor. In 2023 Canada’s Brookfield Asset Management bought 51 per cent and Saskatoon-based Cameco bought 49 per cent of Westinghouse out of Bankruptcy.
On Feb. 16, the Pipeline Online Podcast featured Carl Marcotte, senior vice-president, Marketing & Business Development at CANDU Energy, to discuss why Saskatchewan should consider buying the CANDU reactor. You can watch the whole podcast above.
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How carbon capture is related to nuclear development
SNC-Lavalin was the EPC, or engineering, procurement and contractor responsible for the construction of SaskPower’s Boundary Dam Unit 3 Integrated Carbon Capture and Storage project. That project had notable teething problems for many years, including some significant redesigns. And while it was initially advertised that it would have a capacity to capture one million tonnes of CO2 per year, it has never reached that level yet, after 11.5 years in operation.
Boundary Dam Unit 3 carbon capture facility. Some of the items seen in this picture had to be modified due to teething problems with the initial design. Photo by Brian Zinchuk
The lack of performance in its early years led to litigation between SaskPower and SNC-Lavalin/AtkinsRéalis for the better part of a decade.
According to SaskPower’s October 27, 2025 blog post on BD3’s Q3 2026 status update, the project had captured 7,095,042 tonnes of CO2 in the first 11 years since it had fired up. If initial promises had been fulfilled, that number would have been 11 million tonnes.
However, that post also noted, “During the third quarter of 2025 (July 1 – September 30), the carbon capture and storage (CCS) facility at Boundary Dam Power Station achieved its second-best quarter to date, capturing a total 236,512 tonnes of CO2.” The project had a major workover earlier in the year. But if it was able to maintain a capture rate of 236,512 tonne per quarter over four quarters, that would be brushing relatively close to the initial promise of a million tonnes per year captured. It just took 11 years to get there.
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The elephant in the room
Brian Zinchuk: And there’s an elephant in the room from Saskatchewan, here, being I’m from Estevan. SNC-Lavalin was the EPC that built the Boundary Dam Carbon Capture unit. That started in 2011, finished in 2014 and while it does work, absolutely does work, it has never performed the spec it was supposed to. They had to redesign some stuff. You look at the thing at the top, they had to redo that. They had to pull a tank out and put a new thing in.
And as a result of that, SNC ended up on SaskPower’s official blacklist for the better part of a decade. And about two years ago, when AtkinsRéalis set up a shop in Regina for this whole nuclear thing, I asked the CEO of SaskPower, “Hey, I thought AtkinsRéalis, or SNC Lavalin, as was before, was on the blacklist.”
And he said, “No, they’re not.”
I said, “Well, since when?”
He said, “About two weeks ago.”
So can you explain what happened at Boundary Dam? What lessons were learned? And if Saskatchewan is going to take a bet on a company that didn’t perform very well for us a decade ago, how are you going to resolve that? I mean, it is the elephant in the room that’s got to be discussed.
Carl Marcotte: Yeah, I know, and I appreciate it, and I think that’s a conversation we should have.
So I’m happy you brought it up, Brian, because there are some things to dispel and there are some things to learn from it.
I can say right off the top, there’s two things rattling around in my head as I listen to your question.
And first and foremost, it is the most painful thing for a project company like ourselves, with 40,000 people working in tens of thousands of projects all around the world, every country you can think of, doing great work. Forty thousand employees, mostly almost all engineers, designing and helping build some amazing infrastructure, in rail and advanced hospitals and clean energy and water treatment; all sorts of things.
And to think that we have a project that doesn’t work is painful to all of us. We hate it.
Some of the guts of the carbon capture unit at Boundary Dam Power Station. Photo by Brian Zinchuk
And we did everything we could, and we will continue to do everything we can in any project to make sure we achieve what our customers are trying to achieve, and that we delight our customers. That’s our ethos. That’s our way of working internally.
You should see the project reviews we go through, and how we stretch ourselves everywhere, to make sure we are fully delivering for our customers.
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So something like that, it’s a dozen years ago. It is hard. None of us that work here today in senior leadership were there at the time. So it’s a little hard to get into any specifics and details, partly because I just wasn’t there. But what I can say is it was an incredibly complex project, with a third-party technology, and we tried for years to make it work just right.
So you’re right, the end result was not what we would all have wanted and it was, it was a lot of hurt feelings everywhere at the end of it all.
But I would say, and a complex project like that, you know, it’s complex. You know, at the end of the day, it was a Saskatchewan arbitration panel that had to review all of that and decide on what the right settlement should be and how it should all be finished.
And they did that. It took them years to come up with an understanding of it. So it was that complex a project.
But I would say we will continue, and we do it with every project we’re working on; we’re investing in every way, in shape or form we can think of, to make sure that project is successful and that our customers are delighted.
So all I can say is we operate in a way that seeks to achieve that, and it’s very, very rare for us to have a miss, and we’re going to continue to do our very best, just as we’re doing in some of the projects we’ve been talking about today.
Pipeline Online provides the in-depth coverage and analysis in Saskatchewan’s energy sector that no one other media comes even close to. Our lead story is posted at 7 a.m., Monday to Friday. Follow on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter.
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