5/29/2023 0 Comments Carbon capture technologyGiven our daunting climate targets and the need to rapidly scale up CCUS, these low-capture-cost sources represent an attractive pathway for near-term deployment. However, they will provide a strong incentive for lower-capture-cost opportunities, which are typically industrial sources with relatively concentrated carbon dioxide waste streams with capture costs in the range of $10 to $55 per ton ( 17– 21). The tax credits will likely be insufficient to incentivize widespread carbon capture retrofits on electricity generation plants, considering the current relatively high estimated capture costs around $50 and $75 per ton of carbon dioxide for coal and gas plants, respectively ( 15, 16). CCUS has been held back by inconsistent and insufficient policy support, a lack of economic drivers, and the inherent large scale and associated large cost of individual projects ( 11). Only ∼31 million metric tons (Mt) per year of anthropogenic carbon dioxide are currently captured and injected into geological formations for permanent storage ( 6), while analyses estimate that 200–1,000 Mt per year will be required by 2030 and 5,000–10,000 Mt per year by 2050 ( 7– 10). However, despite its importance, CCUS deployment is lagging far behind estimates of what is required to meet the Paris target ( 5). CCUS, when combined with bioenergy or direct air capture, is also an important option among negative emissions technologies that may be needed to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere ( 3, 4). These studies also conclude that the system-wide cost of decarbonizing the energy system will be lower with CCUS as part of the solution. This represents an opportunity to considerably increase CCUS in the near-term and develop long-term transport infrastructure facilitating future growth.Ĭlimate change mitigation assessments consistently find that carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) is a crucial technology needed to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere sufficiently to limit warming to the 2 ☌ target of the Paris Agreement ( 1, 2). Such a development would face challenges, including coordination between governments and industries, pressing timelines, and policy uncertainties, but is not unprecedented. Thirty million tons per year could be captured with full government pipeline financing, which would double global anthropogenic carbon capture and increase the United States’ carbon dioxide EOR industry by 50%. With 50% government financing for pipelines, 19 million tons of carbon dioxide per year could be captured and transported profitably. Without government finance, we find that a network earning commercial rates of return would not be viable. We estimate capture and transport costs and perform economic analysis for networks under three pipeline financing scenarios representing different combinations of commercial and government finance. Therefore, we analyze the viability of a pipeline network to transport carbon dioxide from Midwest ethanol biorefineries to the Permian Basin in Texas, which has the greatest current carbon dioxide demand for EOR and large potential for expansion. An impediment to deployment of carbon capture at ethanol biorefineries is that most are not close to enhanced oil recovery (EOR) fields or other suitable geological formations in which the carbon dioxide could be stored. The largest existing low-capture-cost opportunity is from ethanol fermentation at biorefineries in the Midwest. In February 2018, the United States enacted significant financial incentives for carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) that will make capture from the lowest-capture-cost sources economically viable.
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