Aquistore

Aquistore is a dedicated deep saline carbon dioxide storage project near Estevan in southeastern Saskatchewan, about three kilometres from SaskPower's Boundary Dam Power Station. It stores the portion of CO2 captured at Boundary Dam Unit 3 that is not sold for enhanced oil recovery, delivered to the site through a two kilometre pipeline and injected into the Cambrian Deadwood Formation and the Black Island member of the Winnipeg Formation at a depth of roughly 3,200 to 3,400 metres. These are among the deepest sedimentary units in the Williston Basin. The project uses a single injection well paired with an observation well about 150 metres away, both instrumented with downhole pressure and temperature gauges and distributed temperature sensing for plume monitoring. SaskPower owns and operates the wells and surface infrastructure, and the Petroleum Technology Research Centre manages the measurement, monitoring and verification program. Injection began in April 2015. The injection well was designed for rates of up to about 1,000 tonnes per day, and the site's storage capacity has been estimated at roughly 8 to 27 million tonnes. Because Aquistore takes only the surplus CO2 from Boundary Dam rather than a steady feed, injection has run in a start and stop pattern well below the design rate, with typical operating rates of 200 to 500 tonnes per day. By mid-2025 the project had stored more than 540,000 tonnes of CO2, roughly ten percent of the volume captured at Boundary Dam over that period. It was the first project in the world to store CO2 in a deep saline aquifer from a coal-fired power plant, and Canada's first dedicated geological CO2 storage site.