SASKPOWER TRANSPORTING HUGE VESSEL TO ESTEVAN

A 100,000 kg cylinder the size of a six-storey building 20 metres long and nearly 12 metres in diameter will be moved by truck from Biggar to SaskPower’s Boundary Dam Power Station near Estevan this week.

The big move, using secondary highways as much as possible, will also require several power lines to be temporarily lifted, the Crown corporation said Monday. Where possible, power will be rerouted to avoid outages.

However, localized power outages may be necessary along the route. Planned outages in the Estevan area on Thursday will be necessary for the final leg of the journey.

Travelling almost continuously, this high-load move will begin at Biggar, then move south on Highway 4 to Rosetown, east on Highway 15 through Outlook and Nokomis to Melville, south on Highway 9 to Whitewood, jogging west on the Trans-Canada to Grenfell, then south on Highway 47 through Stoughton to Estevan.

For more information about planned outages, visit www.saskpower.com/outages. The vessel is one of the major components in SaskPower’s $1.47-billion integrated carbon capture and storage (CCS) project at Boundary Dam’s Unit 3. It will improve the reliability of the storage for the amine solution being used to capture carbon dioxide molecules, the corporation said.

Since last October, the CCS plant has captured more than 400,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, or the equivalent of taking more than 100,000 vehicles off Saskatchewan roads. SaskPower is fine-tuning the process in order to capture up to a million tonnes of CO2 annually when fully operational — equivalent to taking 250,000 vehicles off the road.

The world’s first commercial-scale, post-combustion CCS plant at a coal-fired generating station will provide baseload electrical power to approximately 100,000 Saskatchewan homes, but 10 times cleaner than other coal units and four times cleaner than a comparable combined-cycle, natural gas unit, SaskPower said.