Production continues to move smoothly at the Carbon Capture and Storage Facility at Boundary Dam. 

"We had a really good run in March for both CCS and the power plant, BD3," shared Howard Matthews, Vice President of Power Production. "In fact, we had a really good run here all this year, January, February, and March."

"If we look at our performance, January, we ran available, February was another 100% run and March, we ran almost 100% we missed it by just a couple of hours. We had a fan trip off, took the compressor offline for about two hours so our availability in March was 99.7%. Most people would call that 100% but we try to be real sticklers in terms of accuracy so we didn't claim it as 100% run in March but it was as close as you're going to get."

"We're actually quite happy with the runs so far year. You can see the payoff from last year when we were offline, we made some improvements to the system and to improve the reliability and performance of CCS."

Since the facility started, they have removed well over 2 million tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere. 

He mentioned that during the first week of May, there will be a regularly scheduled outage to make minor repairs and perform maintenance.

"We would go in and do inspections and cleaning of the equipment so nothing unusual here. It's a regular occurrence in our power stations for all the various units. In fact, with this one here, we actually will be doing some maintenance on the power plant as well at Boundary Dam 3. The power station will be coming off and doing some work and some inspection on that unit at the same time as CCS is getting its inspections."

He added that the upgrades made earlier have allowed for easier maintenance.

"We've been able to go in ourselves with our own workers out of Estevan and shut down a piece of equipment to do cleaning on some of this equipment without shutting down the entire facility. That's been a huge improvement in terms of reliability and performance."

The shutdown will likely last around 11-12 days.  

"We expect to come back up and run continuously. There will be another scheduled outage later this year." 

"Thanks to all the folks in the Estevan area. When we do these outages, there are lots of folks who show up for these outages and we certainly appreciate all the support that we get out of people in Estevan and the local businesses there that work so hard with us to make this a success. So thank you to all of them."

READ MORE: Carbon Capture Reaches 2 Million Tonnes Milestone