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CELPIP Practice Reading: Reading for Information ID: #63126 Hard Carbon capture pilot projects

Read the following passage.

A. A long field study of carbon dioxide storage began in southeastern Saskatchewan in 2000. The Weyburn-Midale project, which ran until 2012, examined how CO2 injected into two depleted oilfields could be stored safely. The gas was captured at a coal gasification plant in North Dakota and moved through a 320 km pipeline. The project's managers describe this as the first time a man-made source of CO2 had been used for enhanced oil recovery, in which the gas helps push extra oil toward production wells. The research ended with a best practices book on how to confirm that stored CO2 stays underground.

B. The next step was capture at a power plant. In the fall of 2014, SaskPower's Boundary Dam Power Station near Estevan became, by the utility's account, the first power station in the world to use carbon capture and storage successfully. Only one unit was fitted with the equipment. When it opened, it was expected to capture 90 per cent of the CO2 from this 110 megawatt coal unit, or about one million tonnes a year. Because the station has other coal units, only about 15 per cent of its total emissions were to be captured. The Weyburn oil project also buys carbon from the plant.

C. Smaller test sites grew up around the plant. Since June 2015, the Shand Carbon Capture Test Facility near Estevan has let clients from around the world test their capture systems in a commercial setting. Carbon dioxide from Boundary Dam also goes to Aquistore, a research project that stores it 3.4 km underground in sandstone filled with salty water. The project reports that it has stored more than 620,000 tonnes and that its monitoring work has appeared in over 50 journal papers.

D. Results are usually judged against the goals set at the start. SaskPower reports that the Boundary Dam capture facility has taken in more than seven million tonnes since operations began in 2014. Its availability changes over the year: in the last quarter of 2025 it was available 99.3 per cent of the time, while output fell in the second quarter of 2026 during a planned annual maintenance outage. In an open letter, more than 400 academics described carbon capture as an expensive technology with a poor record of hitting its targets. In 2025 the facility captured roughly seven hundred and twenty thousand tonnes, while the plan at opening was about one million tonnes a year.

E. Not given in any of the above paragraphs.

Decide which paragraph, A to D, has the information given in each statement below. Select E if the information is not given in any of the paragraphs.

 - 1. Firms from other countries can try out their own equipment at a site that runs under real working conditions.

 - 2. After the Weyburn study finished, its storage guidance was written into Saskatchewan law.

 - 3. The gas used in the early study travelled by pipe for more than three hundred kilometres.

 - 4. SaskPower picked that particular unit for the new equipment because it was the newest one at the station.

 - 5. During late 2025, the facility was ready to run almost without a break.

 - 6. Aquistore has kept more carbon dioxide below the surface than the Weyburn study did.

 - 7. Those running the study say it was the first to use carbon dioxide from a human-made source to push out more oil.

 - 8. Most of the station's pollution was never meant to be caught, since the equipment covered just part of it.

 - 9. The research program closed by publishing advice on proving that the gas remains below ground.

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