Shared CO₂ capture, transport, and storage for decarbonizing industrial clusters

A model for estimating CO₂ capture retrofit costs at many types of industrial facilities is developed and then applied in a case study exploring alternative designs for capture, transport, and underground storage of CO₂ from a cluster of industrial facilities in Southeast Louisiana, USA. The capture cost model is anchored by granular chemical process simulations used to determine capacities of individual equipment components, the capital costs for which are estimated using factoring methods. To generalize the cost model, process simulations are developed for target capture streams having CO₂ concentrations of 5, 10, 15, and 94 mol%, and for each concentration, seven different scales of capture plants are modeled. The cost model is then embedded in SimCCSPRO, a customized version of open-source software for optimizing CO₂ pipeline capacities and routings to underground storage sites. For a 22-facility cluster of industrial CO₂ sources with collective emissions of 8.1 million tCO₂/year today, we explore capture, transport and storage (CTS) system designs with varying levels of shared capture and transport infrastructure. When CO₂ pipelines are shared rather than dedicated to individual capture facilities, average transport costs can be reduced by up to two-thirds (and aggregate pipeline length by more than this) for the same level of CO₂ capture and storage. However, capture costs dominate total CTS costs. Because of this, pooling emission streams from multiple facilities and sharing the scale-economy benefits of larger capture facilities enables more significant reductions in CTS costs per tonne of CO₂ stored, even though some of the savings are offset by the added flue gas transport costs. The cost benefits of shared infrastructure are most significant for smaller facilities, i.e., with emissions <0.1 million tCO₂/year.