Quest CCS facility reaches major milestone
In less than four years, the Quest carbon capture and storage (CCS) facility has captured and safely stored four million tons of CO2, ahead of schedule and at a lower cost than anticipated. Four million tons of CO2 is equal to the annual emissions from about one million cars. Quest has now stored underground the most CO2 of any onshore CCS facility in the world with dedicated geological storage.
“Quest continues to show the world that carbon capture and storage (CCS) is working, its costs are coming down,” said Michael Crothers, Shell Canada President and Country Chair. “If Quest were to be built today, we estimate it would cost about 20-30% less to construct and operate.”
Quest is operating at a lower cost thanks to a variety of factors including lower variable costs, capture reliability and reduced storage costs. To help encourage wider use of CCS technology around the world and bring down future costs of building CCS facilities, the designs, certain intellectual property and data from Quest are publicly available. This is due to Quest’s government funding arrangement, which is tied to knowledge sharing commitments to benefit future CCS projects.
Since its start up in late 2015, the capture process at Quest has also worked better than anticipated, helping the facility exceed its target of capturing one million tons of CO2 per year. The facility is also safely storing the CO2 deep underground better than expected.
Quest is world’s first commercial -scale CCS facility applied to oil sands operations and is operated by Shell on behalf of the Athabasca Oil Sands Project (AOSP). The respective ownership interests of AOSP assets in aggregate, directly and indirectly, are 70% Canadian Natural Resources Limited and an affiliate, 20% Chevron Canada Limited and 10% Shell Canada Limited through certain subsidiaries.
Editor’s Notes:
- The Quest CCS facility captures and stores about one third of the CO2 emissions from the Shell-operated Scotford Upgrader near Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta, which turns oil sands bitumen into synthetic crude that can be refined into fuel and other products. The CO2 is transported through a 65-kilometer pipeline and injected more than two kilometers underground below multiple layers of impermeable rock formations.
- Quest has stored the most CO2 of any onshore CCS facility globally with dedicated geological storage. Quest has also captured more CO2 in a calendar year than any other CCS facility with dedicated geological storage. Source: Global CCS Institute
- Quest has a robust measurement, monitoring and verification program verified by a third party (Det Norske Veritas (DNV)) to ensure the CO2 is permanently stored.
- Quest received $865 million from the governments of Canada and Alberta to build and operate the facility.
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