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SaskPower need substantial additional power,” he says.“ Extending the life of those thermal coal assets makes sense.”
With Saskatchewan having its own coal reserves and established mining industry, the fuel is readily available. However, SaskPower recognizes that burning coal creates harmful
CO 2 emissions. To mitigate this, the utility is looking closely at increasing its carbon capture and storage, a technology in use at its coal-fired Boundary Dam Power Station, which recently celebrated its ten-year anniversary.“ That unique unit, attached to one of our coal units at Boundary Dam, is capturing significant amounts of carbon. That is an important project and would be the basis on which we will do further carbon capture in the future if we decide to go in that direction.”
Carbon capture is also largely used in the context of enhanced oil recovery in the Weyburn and Estevan areas, and this technology is further being investigated as
an option for the oil sector.“ The decision will be predicated on the economics, and discussions with our partners. Our objective is increasing our oil production in the province, from around 450,000 barrels a day currently, to 600,000 and then to a million barrels of oil production a day.” He notes there could be a strong case for additional carbon capture based on the approaches and technologies used to achieve this increased output.
On the natural gas side, the construction of the new combined-cycle Aspen Power Station stands out as a notable development. This C $ 1.4bn to C $ 1.7bn project will produce power equal to what’ s needed for about 370,000 homes in Saskatchewan and is more than a quarter completed.“ We are also working on a number of maintenance projects, and we have been working diligently on renewable projects,” he adds.
Renewable energy already makes up a portion of SaskPower’ s energy mix – the organization announced around 600
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