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SaskPower spokesperson Jonathan Tremblay says the company’s target is to operate at 65 per cent of the CCS project’s design capacity because it sells a portion of its design capacity to a third party, which uses the CO2 to stimulate oil and gas wells, and sequesters enough to meet those obligations.

“In our first year of production, we learned a lot,” he said, adding the company did experience some inconsistent performance from the technology when it was first installed.

The Boundary Dam project has also been criticized for being so expensive as to be uneconomic.

“Using CCS to delay the shut down of coal is ultimately not going to be cost-effective in the long run,” said Pembina Institute policy analyst Jason Switzer. “I would think the answer is that solutions are coming on the generation side (like renewables) and in power storage.”

Still, Switzer said CCS or CCUS investments could make sense in other applications, such as steel mills or pulp mills that are expected to operate over a longer period of time so the high initial investment can be recouped. “We do need to work on bringing the costs down and making the technology more viable,” he said.

The investments in CCS technology in Alberta had become so controversial that former premier Jim Prentice scrapped the fund in 2014 as, he said, “This is a very sizeable investment of taxpayers’ money and prudence dictates that we should ensure that we begin to see some commercial viability to these investments.”