Brian Zinchuk is editor and owner of Pipeline Online
SaskPower president and CEO Rupen Pandya, speaking before Estevan City Council on Sept. 25, 2023. Photo by Brian Zinchuk
ESTEVAN – The possibility of converting portions of Saskatchewan’s remaining coal fleet to natural gas keeps coming up, both from SaskPower and the government. And there appears to be a new twist not previously mentioned – continuing to use the Boundary Dam Unit 3 carbon capture plant, but capturing the exhaust from natural gas combustion, not coal.
SaskPower president and CEO Rupen Pandya spent Monday, Sept. 25 in Estevan in numerous meetings, and he spoke to local media before his presentation to Estevan city council.
There are several major issues facing SaskPower. Federal coal regulations require that all conventional unabated coal-fired power end by 2030, just 6 years, three months and three days from now. And the proposed Clean Electricity Regulations, announced on Aug. 10, would require the Canadian electrical grid, including SaskPower, to become “Net Zero by 2035,” meaning it should effectively stop releasing greenhouse gasses, like carbon dioxide from combustion, to the atmosphere by that time. That timeline is in 11 year, three months and three days from now, to effectively replace most of the generating capacity that, according to Pandya, took 93 years to build.
The day before his presentation, natural gas accounted for 1,323 megawatts, or 46 per cent of total power production in Saskatchewan, and coal accounted for 1,157 megawatts, or 40 per cent of total power production.
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Those proposed regulations, currently in the commentary phase from both government and power utilities, pose serious issues for SaskPower. They will allow an extremely small amount of carbon dioxide to be emitted. But that amount is just 30 tonnes of carbon dioxide per gigawatt-hour of power, while unabated coal produces around 1,000 tonnes per gigawatt-hour. Even if the Boundary Dam Unit 3 Carbon Capture project reached its optimal design spec (which it has yet to do, nine years in), it would still be emitting 140 tonnes of CO2 per gigawatt-hour, nearly five times the proposed allowable amount. So carbon capture on coal is effectively not good enough, as the proposed regulations currently stand.
Pandya said SaskPower is doing its initial analysis of the Clean Electricity Regulations as proposed, and will be taking part in the commentary. “I can tell you, based on that initial read, that the current requirements are not currently technologically achievable,” he said.
Carbon capture on natural gas
The alternative would be to install carbon capture on Saskatchewan’s natural gas-fired power plants, at roughly $1 billion a piece, at out major natural gas power stations. That would include Saskatoon, Swift Current, Moose Jaw, North Battleford and eventually Lanigan. But the conundrum is no one has yet done a commercial-scale carbon capture test on large-scale natural gas-fired power in Canada, at least, not yet. Capital Power is working on developing carbon capture on a plant near Edmonton, but that hasn’t occurred yet.
Pandya said, “Yes, we are actively looking at question of carbon capture retrofits to our existing gas assets, including even here in Estevan, with respect to Shand, (Boundary Dam Units) 3 and 6. That’s what we’ve been open about that. That’s part of our planning. You know, we’re looking at all options to help us transition as smoothly as possible.”
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“It’s part of our power planning that we are actively looking at all our available options. Now, we have a major piece of regulatory legislation that is, in the review process, and we don’t know how that will turn out. But certainly, over the course of the last number of years, we’ve been actively looking at all those options to help us manage the transition.”
He pointed out that running carbon capture on the exhaust from natural gas combustion could result in higher capture rates vs. coal. He said, “The flue is thinner with respect to natural gas versus coal. And so, in theory, we’ll be able to capture a higher percentage of the carbon out of gas fired conversion than we would out of our current coal version.
“So we’ll look at that. That’s what the technical questions or the technical work that we’re doing right now is to look at exactly that question: how can we operate that asset that would technically operate till 2044, but … under the Clean Electricity Regulations, can’t meet that 30 tonnes per gigawatt hour threshold? How could we operate that? And one of the ways we need to look at, as utility, is if we convert it to gas, how close can we get? And so, we’re actively looking at that.”
The Boundary Dam Unit 3 carbon capture plant does indeed capture CO2 from coal exhaust. But can it do it from natural gas, and more importantly, can it capture a much higher percentage? Photo by Brian Zinchuk
The pilot plant is essentially already built
If SaskPower were to convert Boundary Dam Unit 3 to natural gas, sooner rather than later, it would provide the Crown corporation with the opportunity to prove out carbon capture on natural gas with a facility it already has in place, bought and paid for. It could do this before seeking to adopt carbon capture on a more widespread basis with natural gas-fired power production. Pandya didn’t expressly say that, but agreed with the methodology behind it.
He said, “They will want to understand. We’ll do front end unit engineering design study on BD3 to see what the coal-to-gas conversion would do, and what that would look like.
“But it goes back to this first question, which is that there currently is no carbon capture on a natural gas plant in Canada. Capital Power in Alberta is currently going down that path. And they’re doing some very good work. They will likely be in production in 2026-27. And we’ll get our first real data in terms of what is the chemical composition, the amines that you’re using to capture off of natural gas plant. And that’s a repowered plant. That was a coal plant that’s been repowered to gas that they’re putting carbon capture on. So I think that that would be, in terms of data, maybe our closest data point on whether or not we can get anywhere near 30 or anything else.”
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He said the timeline would depend on the state of technology. But fundamentally, SaskPower knows that carbon capture does, indeed, work. And the fly ash in the emissions that causes the amine (the critical fluids used to capture the carbon dioxide) to degrade, requiring cleaning and recharging of the amines. The result is a capture rate of 75 to 80 per cent. “So really, the question isn’t whether it will work or not. It’s a question of what’s the efficiency? And do we want to take the front-end, first-of-its-kind risk, in terms of launching (natural gas) carbon capture on our carbon capture facility. Or should we wait until someone else has taken the risk?”
That’s a significant point for SaskPower, as Boundary Dam 3 was, itself, a first-of-its-kind risk, and no other major utilities followed it its path, for post-combustion capture on coal, at least.
Reducing emissions and carbon taxes
Generally speaking, burning natural gas instead of coal reduces carbon dioxide emissions by half. Thus, converting the remaining coal fleet, or at least part of it, to natural gas would not only reduce emissions by half for each generating unit converted, but that reduction would correspondingly reduce the ever-increasing carbon tax burden. By April 1, 2027, that carbon tax would be $125 per tonne of CO2 emitted, roughly double the carbon tax today. So reducing emissions by half in that time frame would have a dramatic impact on the carbon tax penalty. That, of course, was the entire purpose of the carbon tax – to make it too expensive to continue emitting CO2.
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Impact on coal mining
If SaskPower does go down this path (and no timelines have been released publicly), it would mean the end of coal-fired power at Estevan, and almost certainly lead to the closure of the local coal mines. (The Bienfait char facility uses just a small fraction of the coal produced from the mines.) Unfortunately, the abbreviated window of time Pandya was available to the media did not allow time for further questioning on that front at the time.
However, Pandya was asked by Pipeline Online how the Poplar River Power Station at Coronach fits into all of this. He responded, “Poplar River has been an important source of generation for Saskatchewan for all as well over 50 years.
Is the end of the road for coal coming sooner than later? Photo by Brian Zinchuk
“You’ll know that over the course of the summer, we had a significant event impact that facility. We lost 580 megawatts of generation province-wide. And we were able to manage through the very good work of everybody else in the power system. But certainly, even our large industrial customers, we were able to manage through what would have been a virtual new summer peak, had we not had a demand response management occurring across our system.
“We’ve been to Poplar River to share the news that the current federal law requires us to end unabated coal by 2030. And that is what I’ve shared that message in Coronach, with the town and the RM, and certainly with their staff in that facility. So, you know, part of that the direction that the corporation is taking for it is to continue to build out aggressively as part of our equivalency agreement,” he said.
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Equivalency agreement driving wind and solar construction
When Saskatchewan was all-but-begging for an agreement with the federal government to allow it to operate some its coal units a few more years, it eventually reached something called an “equivalency agreement” with the feds. But it appears there was an element to that agreement that wasn’t broadly discussed at the time or since, but is increasingly relevant today. That’s because it’s a driving factor in the dramatic increase of wind and solar power generation being built in this province in the next few years, despite their problematic intermittent nature which often results in no power generated from wind on extremely hot, or cold, days.
Pandya said, “When we signed the equivalency agreement with the federal government in 2014 to allow us to keep using coal to the end of 2030, part of that agreement required us to build out renewables in the province, so that we could operate coal assets, coal generators, past their end of life. And that’s what we’ve been able to do. And we continue to do. So, part of the build out of renewables that’s required as part of the equivalency agreement, that 3,000 megawatts that we need to put in place by 2035. I think 2,000 by 2030. A good tranche of that will be in that south central part of Saskatchewan around the Coronach. So we currently have in the market an RFP for 700 megawatts of wind and solar in the Coronach region, so it’ll will actually go into power, if all goes well with RFPs, in 2027.”
While Pandya did not mention this, as Poplar River produces 580 megawatts of power, it thus has the corresponding grid connections to handle that much power. The proposed 700 megawatts of wind and solar, when near full output, would closely match Poplar River’s output, thus backfilling the eventual reduction in coal output while maximizing the use of the existing transmission grid.
Power generation in Saskatchewan on Sunday, Sept. 24. For 20 minutes, wind power dropped to 0.3 per cent of nameplate capacity. SaskPower
However, the day before Pandya had these discussions, SaskPower’s own Where Your Power Comes From webpage noted that on Sunday, Sept. 24, Saskatchewan’s 617 megawatts of grid-scale power generation averaged 39 megawatts over 24 hours. Asked for clarification on this, SaskPower spokesperson Joel Cherry noted, “Wind was at a minimum of 2 MW for about 20 minutes on Sept 24, we had no times when wind power fell to zero.”
Two megawatts would equate to 0.3 per cent of nameplate wind capacity, or the equivalent of one large Caterpillar generator.
On Thursday: Part 3: Remember those legal issues SaskPower had with SNC-Lavalin over Boundary Dam Unit 3? There’s been major movement on that front.
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