QUEST, Alberta, Canada

The Quest Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) Facility is a fully integrated commercial scale CCS facility located at the Scotford Industrial Complex, near Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta, Canada. The Scotford Industrial Complex includes a refinery, heavy oil upgrading facility and chemicals plant.

The Quest CCS Facility is part of the heavy oil upgrading facility, capturing CO2 produced during the production of hydrogen at three Hydrogen Manufacturing Units (HMUs). CO2 is captured using Amine technology, dehydrated and compressed for transportation by pipeline to the Storage Facility which consists of three injection wells, approximately 65km north of the Scotford Industrial Complex.

The Storage Complex is a 350m thick package which includes the Basal Cambrian Sandstone (BCS) reservoir, capped by the Middle Cambrian shale and the Lotsberg salts.

Quest is a Shell operated joint venture which safely stores approximately one million metric tonnes of CO2 each year, with the intent to operate at these injection rates for 25 years. As of 2020, the Quest Facility has safely injected over five million tonnes of CO2.

A Monitoring, Measuring and Verification (MMV) plan is in place to ensure the safe storage of the CO2. Technologies are in place to monitor all domains of the Storage Facility including the atmosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, geosphere, and wells.

Microseismic monitoring has been in operation at Quest since November 2014, with the aim of addressing risks associated with containment and induced earthquake hazard.

As of December 31st, 2020, no microseismic activity has been located within the Storage Complex. Low level, small magnitude microseismic activity has been located deep beneath the Storage Complex in the Precambrian basement. So far microseismicity has been monitored using only a single array of eight three-component geophones in a monitoring well at a central location.

With a view to improving monitoring coverage over the injection area and reducing monitoring costs, monitoring from surface, and in-well monitoring using optical fibres and a laser interrogation unit for Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) will be tested.

Data from the downhole geophone array, the surface geophone array and the in-well DAS system will be provided to the ENSURE project group for the purpose of evaluating the relative usefulness for CCS projects of these three monitoring techniques and comparing their cost-effectiveness.

Overview map of the Quest site including various monitoring setups and microseismic activity up to December 2021.