Volume 5: Innovative Solutions for Energy Transitions: Part IV

Comparative Analysis of CCUS Chain with Different Types of Source and Sink Dan Wang, Lin Gao, Sheng Li, Song He

Abstract

The economy of China is highly coal intensive. CO2 Capture, utilization, and Storage (CCUS) is now the only available technology that can cut up to 90% of CO2 emissions from power plants and large industrial processes fueled by coal or other fossil fuels. Without CCUS, the cost of meeting the anticipated long-term climate change mitigation objectives would be about 25% higher. For this reason, CCUS is recognized as the indispensable clean coal technologies in China. However, the progress of CCUS technology in the past several decades is rather behind that of the renewable energy, not only in China, but also in the world wide. The aim of this paper is to identify the critical gap interfering the deployment of CCUS technology from the level of whole CCUS chain, and then find the path for promoting CCUS development. In this paper, five CCUS cases with different combination of CO2 sources and sinks, which including the one combining high purity source in coal chemical production industry with enhanced of oil recovery, and another one combining coal fired power plants with saline aquifer storage, are evaluated. The performance of different case like energy penalty, the economic cost and the environmental emission are compared. The results indicate that the CCUS case with high purity resources shows significant advantages in the energy penalty and the cost. On the basis of this result, the breakpoint for development of low cost CCUS technologies is indicated, and the recommendations are suggested.

Keywords carbon capture and storage, CCUS cases study, energy penalty, economic cost, environmental emission