The pioneering green initiative hosted by the Energy City that has attracted attention from all around the world, the Carbon Capture and Storage Facility, continues to make progress and improvements as it is further developed.

After tests proving the system's reliability, and steady production rates of 800,000 tonnes achieved over 12 months, Saskpower is setting their sights on a new objective to attain for the project. Howard Mathews, the Vice President of Power Production explained.

"We've proven that the facility can run reliably and at reasonable levels of production. Our goal going forward this year is to drive down our costs, both aiming and operating. We will be trying to get those as low as we can to make CCS as competitive as it can be so that we can give the right information to people who are going to be making decisions on carbon capture here in the future."

"As a result, we expect that we won't necessarily see the high production numbers that we have seen in the past. That's okay, because that's part of the plan of minimizing our costs to make the best case for carbon capture," he added.

According to Mathews, the expenses-cutting route doesn't have anything to do with the controversial provincial budget cuts.

"Saskpower is a crown corporation. We actually generate a net profit which goes to the government to help them fund the necessary things in the province like healthcare, education and our roads. We don't see the budget reductions impacting carbon capture going forward."

He added that they will strive to get the best value and lowest costs in all of their operations.

Mathews revealed that June will be a busy time for the project, with all sorts of work involved.

"We do have a big shut down coming up in that time. Both the power island and the generating unit are scheduled for their regular two year outage to come off and have a lot of inspection and work done on the boiler and the turbine. Carbon Capture also comes off at the same time."

"For the CCS we are adding in quite a bit of redundant equipment that will allow us to continue operating the facility at good production rates while we do cleaning on various pieces. We don't want to have to shut the facility down to go in and do these things."

He noted that, overall, they hope to see a general improvement in operating costs by the end of the June shut down.

In addition, the work will require a fair amount of skilled trades-people to come in, and that will be a boon for local businesses.

"This will add more people to the Estevan area, and think that that's good news for the residents."

He concluded by expressing that they expect to see good results for the future of the Carbon Capture and Storage project with their plan moving forward.