It's been a busy time at the Boundary Dam Power Plant, as SaskPower cut off some of their electricity production in order to perform some work.

"This is nothing unusual. Boundary Dam Unit 3, or BD3, has been shut down for a regularly scheduled maintenance overhaul. Our Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) plant is shut down as well, because of course it can't run unless the other is going," shared Howard Mathews, SaskPower's Vice President of Power Production.

"Primarily the work that goes on there is in the boiler itself. There's miles and miles of tube that's subjected to a lot of wear and tear and heat, so we go in on a regular basis on all of our boilers and do this kind of overhaul work."

He added that while this is going on, the rest of the plant's productions systems are running and producing. However, the CCS is connected to BD3, and thus why it gets shut down at the same time.

While the work in BD3 is simply routine maintenance, the CCS is also undergoing some additional upgrades. According to Mathews, in order to get in and clean the equipment they must be able to isolate the heat exchangers. Unless these have the proper safety systems installed, specifically the bellow block and bleed valves, they would have to shut the entire plant down in order to perform the work. The changes will enable them to increase the reliability of the CCS.

"This has all been planned out for quite some time, the parts are ordered and the people are busy right now trying to get BD3 back on line and to complete the regular maintenance on the CCS facility, which will finish up in a couple of weeks."

There is no effect to residents of the southeast, as power is still put out by the rest of the Boundary Dam station. 

"There's no risk to the system in terms of supply, it's been well forecasted and taken into account. We expect to see CCS back up and running, and we're already at well over one and a half million tons captured to date by that facility. That's equivalent to taking 350,000 vehicles off the road in Canada, so we see that as a significant contribution," Mathews said.
"