CO2 transport for fast-track CCS: Balancing economics and environmental impacts in industrial clusters

Carbon Capture and Sequestration is a key technology for decarbonizing energy-intensive industries and power generation. To accelerate its deployment, affordable and efficient carbon dioxide (CO2) transport solutions are needed. In this paper a tiered multi-objective optimization method is developed to predict a hierarchy of CO2 transport strategies, balancing the financial costs and environmental impacts. The method is applied to optimize the strategies for collecting CO2 from five energy-intensive industries in the North Sea Port industrial cluster. The results show that a low pressure (35 bar) CO2 collection pipeline network and a point-to-point CO2 transport by barges (the ‘hub and spoke’ design) are the two most optimal (tier 1) competitive strategies. Lower-tier solutions involving using higher pressure (110 bar) pipelines and ‘milk round’ shipping of CO2, come at greater costs and larger environmental impacts. The costs and environmental impacts are largely attributed to the electricity consumed in CO2 compression and liquefaction. The use of a low-carbon electricity mix is shown to reduce the environmental impacts by ca 80 % across all the scenarios studied. The study concludes that paying for unabated emissions during two years of construction of the CO2 pipelines nearly doubles the cost of the project, making CO2 shipping the more cost-effective solution.