Shell announced on September 5, 2012, that it will build the first carbon capture and storage (CCS) project for an oil sands operation in Canada. The Quest project will be built on behalf of the Athabasca Oil Sands Project joint venture owners (Shell, Chevron and Marathon Oil) and with support from the Governments of Canada and Alberta.
The Shell news release says that CCS is critical to meeting the huge projected increase in global energy demand while reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Shell is advancing CCS technology on a number of fronts around the world, but Quest will be its flagship project, says Peter Voser, CEO of Royal Dutch Shell.
The Quest CCS project will capture more than one million tons per year of CO2 from the Scotford Upgrader located near Edmonton, Alberta and transport it up by an 80 km underground pipeline to a storage site north of the Scotford site. Here, it will inject it more than two kilometers underground into a porous rock formation called the Basal Cambrian Sands (BCS), which is located beneath layers of impermeable rock. Sophisticated monitoring technologies will ensure the CO2 is permanently stored.
Quest is the world’s first commercial-scale CCS project to tackle carbon emissions in the oil sands, and the first CCS project in which Shell will hold majority ownership and act as designer, builder and operator. It will also form the core of Shell’s CCS research program and help develop Shell’s CO2 capture technology.
The Athabasca Oil Sands project produces bitumen, which is piped to Shell’s Scotford Upgrader near Edmonton, Alberta. From late 2015, Quest will capture and store deep underground more than one million tons a year of CO2 produced in bitumen processing. Quest will reduce direct emissions from the Scotford Upgrader by up to 35%, the equivalent of taking 175,000 North American cars off the road annually.
Both the Canadian and Albertan governments have identified CCS as an important technology in their strategies to reduce CO2 emissions. The Alberta government will invest $745 million in Quest from a $2-billion fund to support CCS, while the Government of Canada will invest $120 million through its Clean Energy Fund. Shell has received the necessary federal and provincial regulatory approvals for Quest.
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