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Government of Saskatchewan says coal has a future. SaskPower is to look at running Poplar River and Boundary Dam Units 4,5 and 6 for decades to come, considering rebuilding them and ignoring federal coal mandate to shut down by 2030. Minister Jeremy Harrison was in Coronach and Estevan telling coal workers that coal has a future.
Here’s the op-ed he submitted exclusively to Pipeline Online, explaining what was going on. I just had a detailed interview with him which will be published Monday.
This is an enormous turnaround that cannot be understated. Saskatchewan is not giving up on coal. Estevan and especially Coronach get a huge reprieve.
And it’s a giant up yours to the feds. I’m sure Guilbeault will have a canary, and a cow. But he won’t eat the cow because my get is he’s a vegan.
Hopefully my 100+ stories talking about the unreliability of wind and solar, and imploring we shouldn’t throw away what works for what we know absolutely doesn’t work had some impact on this.
I’ll have more to write about this in the coming days. There are lots of implications. For instance, since we own the coal, we charge ourselves basically nothing for it. We do pay for the mining, however. But for natural gas, since our domestic production has dropped like a stone, most of our gas comes from Alberta. So every dollar we spend on their gas is a dollar leaving the province, never to come back (sound like Trump?) And here’s the kicker – when LNG Canada goes online, what do you think is going to happen to gas prices? Does anyone think it’ll stay around $2/gigajoule another 10 years? Or will it go up – maybe to $4, or even $6? All of a sudden, gas won’t be so cheap anymore, nor will the electrical power derived from it. But our nearly free coal will be. And once the carbon tax is gone – smooth sailing!
Also, this just happened (gradually, then suddenly…)
BREAKING: With “second carbon tax” in jeopardy, FCL and AGT pause renewable diesel and crush plant projects. The carbon pendulum is swinging, hard.
Terrific news…. all of this.
just curious is Sask going to be buying the coal from Chirer just kidding
ye gawds finally some sanity in the area of energy generation
Awesome!!
How ChiCom of Sask Power … emulating the world’s communist superpower! Little Potato should be so proud.
I’m not a fan of coal but it’s way better than wind and solar. Hopefully saskpower still builds nuclear because I think that’s the future of baseload power, with nat gas and hydro used for both baseload and peak power demand.
Nothing wrong with coal. Please do not be stupid. It made the western world prosperous.
I’ve worked in all of saskpower’s coal power stations, I know exactly what I’m talking about.
But they can make them much cleaner.
To some extent they can, shand was reasonably clean when it was new (environmentally and the physical working environment for workers). But, the coal plants are far more dangerous and dirty than all of the other types of power production like nuclear, natgas and hydro. There’s really not a solution with the current design of coal power stations.
Òne of the chemists worked on gasification of coal but saskpower went with carbon capture instead. I wonder if coal is to be used then maybe a relook at gasification is a possibility.
LC, this your field of expertise, not mine. You know what emission controls they have and what can be reasonably installed with sufficient plant life to recoup the upgrading. I presume that they all have electrostatic precipitators to filter out heavy metals. The only real issue for me would appear to be filtration of SO2.
As to returning coal-fired plants to service, this is a wise decision for a province which does not have the resources to waste sunk capital. One of the worst decisions Ontario ever made was the all-Party decision to force the closure of Nanticoke in 2013. It was then the largest, most efficient coal-fired station in North America and fully amortized.
I am not a fan of coal-fired generation either. But destroying a properly functioning coal plant because of global warming superstition is simply insane.
Yes, all of the coal units now have ESPs. They also have SOx and NOx scrubbers (except perhaps the oldest units). The biggest environmental impact is small particulate coal dust within the station, tailings, ash piles, physical hazards of a plant that grinds and moves coal, chemical exposure, hearing loss even with hearing protection and such. This is not a comprehensive list, just the bigger ones.
I understand the economic benefits of coal power and mining. I have never supported stranding assets. The coal plants should run to the end of their natural life. As I’ve said before, there is a case to be made for modernizing power production but not with ridiculously unreliable, unaffordable solar and wind.
If you spend time in a coal plant, a hydro plant and a natgas plant then you’ll easily understand the differences. I’ve never been in a nuclear facility but I assume that they are more similar to hydro and natgas than coal power stations.
LC, I’ve been in all of Canada’s NPPs. Several points:
1. the physical security is enormous against hostile human intervention;
2. like a coal-fired plant, there’s an enormous amount of piping transporting steam;
3. the control room looks like the cockpit of an aircraft;
4. you have to go through radiation screening to exit the plant interior. This is very rapid now with the advances in radiation detection over the past four decades.
5. the housekeeping is immaculate.
So on balance because of the steam systems, they heavily resemble a coal-fired station. (I was in Lakeview when it was still alive and functioning.) Except for the nuclear reactor heat source creating the boiling water, there’s very little difference between coal and nuclear superficially. The principal physical risk for both facilities is a steam blast escaping. (That was what happened at Chernobyl in 1986.)
Coal plants are a lot less dangerous than travelling by car.
Having to reply to cgh with respect to SO2 but there have been scrubbers for that since the 1930s. The Cominco lead-zinc plant at Trail, BC, was somewhat notorious for its emissions during the early days (the locals were want to say that didn’t have to mow the lawn, just had to wait for the wind to change). However, the US in the early ’30s pushed against emissions, particularly SO2, so Cominco (then CM&S) promptly installed good scrubbers on their smokestacks at the plant in Tadanac (up one bench from Trail), built a pipeline up to the next bench, and installed a fertilizer plant at Warfield.
Incidentally, the Warfield plant was also home to a heavy water building. CM&S was at that time home to a fair few bright and curious minds, and they took advantage of local abundant water and cheap hydro to explore this new phenomenon in the ’30s. During WW II, the whole complex was under high security as being a crucial industry, and have never been able to discover just what role – if any – the plant played in supplying heavy water for the A-bombs.
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Frances, “During WW II, the whole complex was under high security as being a crucial industry, and have never been able to discover just what role – if any – the plant played in supplying heavy water for the A-bombs.”
The Warfield plant produced all of the heavy water used for the NRX reactor built at Chalk River in 1944. There were two routes to making plutonium: one used reactors using light water built with graphite moderators, the other, followed by the British and Canadians, using heavy water. The Americans completed their method first of graphite piles at Hanford Reservation. That’s where the plutonium for the Little Boy at Nagasaki came from.
At the end of the war, Britain repatriated its nuclear research team in Canada, and Canada retained the NRX reactor for research and medical purposes.
My next band will now be called “Waste Sunk Capital”.
In replying to your later comment about coal gasification, didn’t England have similar plants quite some years ago? They’d be long gone now, as is their coal industry, but seem to remember some odd “gasification” plants along the Thames seen in WW II movies.
That was producer or coal gases manufactured out of coal or wood. There were many different types of these synthetic gases, but they were what was used to power the gas-light systems of the 19th century. These systems were rather hazardous, and all were made obsolete when electric light became available after Edison’s discovery of the incandescent light bulb. Public coal gas lights also usually had to be lit by hand.
The coal gasification idea that the saskpower chemist was researching was based on the coal gasification plant in North Dakota.
https://www.dakotagas.com/
“Basin Electric Power Cooperative, through its for-profit subsidiary, Dakota Gasification Company, owns and operates the Great Plains Synfuels Plant. The Synfuels Plant is the only commercial-scale coal gasification plant in the United States that was originally designed and operated to manufacture synthetic natural gas from lignite coal. It is also the cleanest energy plant operating in the state of North Dakota”
IIRC, his idea was coal to synfuel that would be used to power a combined cycle natgas power station. Saskatchewan has huge deposits of lignite coal.
How old are you LC? I remember when coal was what every house in our town burned as a source of heat and to cook. The snow in winter would have soot in it and houses were painted dark brown, black, dark green etc. We are still alive and all changed to oil heat when it became available. Don’t say you are not a fan of coal and then pretend to defend it’s use.
The advantage of nuclear is the no coal dust, the absence of noise and machine injury from coal crushing and nuclear has very little waste material. The amount of ash produced by coal plants is immense. Only the lightest grades are marketable and the rest is piled up and leveled like a landfill and run off goes into ash ponds.
There are far too many severe injuries and chronic injuries from long term work in coal plants, imo. Environmental protection at coal stations is done very well considering the realities of burning coal.
LC
What ever happened to the research into clean coal scrubbing tech that was promised by researchers at the U of C and other erudite institutions?
And promised to be “scaled up” many years ago.
If you mean carbon capture, then BDPS has a unit with CCS tech installed. There was lots of glitches in the system but it works. Very expensive retrofit of the old conventional unit though. The carbon dioxide is captured and used for enhanced oil recovery in SE Saskatchewan oil fields.
Stevie, perhaps the most advanced technology for clean coal combustion was fluidized bed combustion. This method reduced enormously both SOx and NOx emissions.
It has been demonstrated at North America’s only CFB coal unit at Point Aconi in Cape Breton Island Nova Scotia. This plant went into service in 1994. It has typical availability of about 98%. It provides about 16% of Nova Scotia’s electricity. It was intended to burn the high-sulfur content of Cape Breton coal. It has much higher combustion efficiency than conventional coal-fired furnaces.
CO2 is not a problem.
“please do not be stupid”
well please do not be rude maybe?
Nuclear is WOKE CULTURAL MARXISM on Steroids.
Toxic for WHITE MALES.
Rainbow flags, Rainbow Sidewalks, and filled with Sociopaths, rising to their own level of incompetence.
BURN COAL!!!!!!! Don’t engage people who put morals on Power Generation. They are Marxists.
Good move. Tell the feds where to shove it and keep your people warm and safe. I am an old man and may need a warm house to live in if the liberal/ndp/communists have their way. Carney will kill us if he gains power and the lib commies are re-elected.
This seems to be the Moe Mojo.
Nod and mumble “agreement” to the feds then do whatever you need.
After 9 years of constant obstruction and attack upon the Western Economy by Dear Leader , Moe knows what words are worth..When talking to Liberals.
Maybe finally, the adults in charge have realized that the children of trusts have never grown up and their ideas are nothing but the musings of spoiled children that have obtained power and have a hissy fit if forced to defend their actions and they should be charged a penalty for the damage caused.
That would be a win-win-win.
The moronic, easily-disprovable, anti-scientific scam of AGW has caused irreparable harm to millions, and cost our economy untold billions. It has greatly increased the cost of living while turning our electrical system unstable in the process. And grifters have taken advantage of billions of taxpayer dollars stolen by the gov’t to build unwanted and worse-than-useless giant windmills and the like.
Further, if canola production is massively curtailed, that would be a boon for the health of Canadians. Canola is a toxic product that should NEVER be consumed in any quantity. And if its biofuels are as terrible for engines as ethanol, then it would no longer be even considered as an alternative b/c it would be again priced out of consideration.
Everyone pushing anything related to the scam of AGW should be laughed out of polite society, and then the world can return a little closer to sanity.
Yes indeed. The destruction of Global Warming has nothing to do with the physical environment.
It’s been a fraud from day one.
Moe’s in-your-face response to Trudeau’s suicidal tariff response; the gloves are finally off and we can now fight Climate $cam “even with half our brains tied behind our backs”. Environmental concerns are nice, to teach your children, but we’re at war with China and must get our priorities straight. The 5th columnists may now proceed with their performance-art of pretending moral-outrage.
My big concern is speed. The Cons will ‘study’ every old Liberal policy for months or years before they make any effective changes, hurting Canadians even more. By time they make the corrections, they will then become ‘election issues’ the next time around.
If PPs gov’t wants to be effective, and be seen doing something, they have to move fast….bypass Parliament and use Orders in Council – as Trudeau did – to make changes unpopular to the Left.
They have to be busier in the first 6 months than in the entire rest of their mandate.
A couple of questions:
1. Can Sask. coal ash be used as fertilizer or is it too toxic?
2. There is a lot of talk about geo-engineering the climate by using SO2. Could the SO2 from a coal plant be used for this?
Especially the lighter weight ash (fly ash) is in high demand. However, SaskPower has given one company sole rights so a lot of it is wasted.
that question about coal as a fertilizer is a good one. the OSB plant near High Prairie used to spread the ash from burnt hog fuel on nearby farms, not real sure about the benefits, but never heard of any complaints either.
I don’t know about SO2..with all the elemental sulfur available at large sour gas processing plants, maybe SO2 sequestration would be an option, but given the enviroidiots fixation with CO2 it’s under the radar.
I can only hope that the owners of thermal generation facilities in AB are doing their best to preserve the coal infrastructure associated with the plants…I’d like to see AB take a page from the SaskPower handbook
Nothing grows on the pile of fly ash behind Shand. Toxic stuff.
The sulphur is stripped from the flue gas at Boundary CCS and manufactured into sulphuric acid. Sulphuric acid is marketable.
Coal. If it’s good enough for China …
You talking Nat King Coal, there, round eye?
Straighten Up and Fly Right Stevie.
L – Finally, someone in the legislature has been reading Zinchuk’s charts about the consequences of virtue signalling via hundreds of $millions spent on solar/wind power. Good work Brian.
This is good news and very wise. Alberta should not have eliminated the last of the coal generators at Genesee. They were supposed to be rebuilt as dual fuel but instead are now gas only. Keeping some coal in the mix will make for more reliable generation.
Maybe that’s a feature. With spot market pricing there’s the opportunity for windfail profits.
This is a genuine public service. God’s speed!
Thanks for all your efforts at the coal face, Brian! Persuasion brings results!
Shhhhh … Quiet!
Is that a return to sanity I hear?
I’ve waited a long time for reason to trump the idiotic rhetoric of the last thirty years.
Thank you.
Great news and a move done in the interests of the people not oligarchs in UN/WEF.
” But for natural gas, since our domestic production has dropped like a stone, most of our gas comes from Alberta. So every dollar we spend on their gas is a dollar leaving the province, never to come back (sound like Trump?)”
Yes it does because it’s economically inept and stupid. There is nothing gained from ‘keeping money in the province’. The point of money is to buy stuff with it. This is like growing your own food to keep money in your house. Dumb