To reduce greenhouse gas emissions, governments and corporations alike are more and more evaluating the potential of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS). The technology describes the process of capturing carbon dioxide (CO₂) and securely storing, or sequestering, it underground in depleted oil and gas fields or deep saline aquifer formations It is said to capture up to 90% of the CO₂ emissions produced by consuming fossil fuels to generate electricity.

There are more than 20 large-scale CCS projects around the world, with close to 20% of those in Canada. CCS is expected to play a significant role in helping Canada to achieve its target of a 30% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, which of course helps to slow climate change.  Some of these facilities are capturing and storing amounts of CO₂ annually equivalent to the emissions of 250,000 automobiles. But despite this success, CCS remains a little-known technology and is often overshadowed by other technologies such as renewable energy.

North America’s first commercial-scale CCS facility sits some 65 kilometers northeast of the Canadian city of Edmonton. The Shell Quest CCS facility in Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta captures and then sequesters CO₂ underground in a geological formation known as the Basal Cambrian Sands.

Overlooking the Shell Quest facility at Fort Saskatchewan, the first large-scale CCS facility in North America.

Sarah Kassam, a CCS Development Planner at Shell, has been excited by the performance of the reservoir, stating that it has performed above expectations by taking more CO₂ than expected and at much lower pressures. In fact, the pressures have been so low that there’s been no visible result of it in any of the site’s overlying formations.

Since its opening in late 2015, the Shell Quest facility has sequestered five million metric tons of CO₂ as of March 2020, a milestone that was reached six months ahead of schedule. The Canadian government has approved the facility to capture and store up to 1.2 million tonnes of CO₂ annually.

According to Kassam, the amount of CO₂ captured and sequestered by the Quest facility is greater than the amount of CO₂ that would be collected naturally in an area the size of Alberta’s three main national parks – Banff, Jasper, and Waterton Lakes – covered entirely by trees. She notes that the reservoir has significantly more storage capacity than the 27 million tonnes of CO₂ storage currently approved for the site. At its current expected annual rates of carbon capture, the Quest facility could continue operating until 2040.

Sarah Kassam, CCS Development Planner at Shell.

The Shell Quest facility demonstrates that proven technologies across the CCS industry can be used in unique and sustainable ways to reduce carbon emissions to the atmosphere. In particular, Kassam notes that carbon capture and storage need not happen only at manufacturing sites like the Quest facility. Instead, the process can happen at other facilities such as cement plants or fertilizer plants which are emitting huge amounts of CO_2.

Likewise, sequestration is not the only method of handling CO₂. One of the unique characteristics of CO₂ makes it an effective heat transfer fluid. As such, heat recovery systems using CO₂ instead of steam are helping to make power generation plants more efficient. In this win-win scenario, CO₂ is prevented from escaping into the air and is used to improve power generation efficiency, thereby reducing emissions even further.

Another use for captured CO₂ is Power-to-Gas, which uses renewable energy to produce green hydrogen and in a next step CO₂ can be added in a methanation process to create climate-neutral synthetic natural gas. It can then be used in several ways: as a transport fuel; to produce heat or to power industrial processes – just to name a few.

The Shell Quest CCS facility at Fort Saskatchewan is a commercially viable way to capture and store CO₂.