White Paper: Towards improved guidelines for cost evaluation of carbon capture and storage

Technical Review

11 August 2021

Keith Burnard

Citation: IEAGHG, "White Paper: Towards improved guidelines for cost evaluation of carbon capture and storage", 2021-TR05, August 2021.

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Publication Overview

One of the key barriers to the wide scale application of CCS is cost. Understanding the costs of CCS is essential to understand the role for and potential of CCS technology in addressing climate change, and for guidance in research activities aiming to reduce the cost and improve the performance of promising new CCS technologies in different applications. This white paper, entitled ‘Towards improved guidelines for cost evaluation of carbon capture and storage’, addresses three of the challenges that remain to establish reliable cost estimates for CCS technologies, namely: estimating the future “Nth-of-a-kind” (NOAK) cost of advanced technologies that are currently at early pre-commercial stages of development; improving existing guidelines for cost evaluation of CCS from industrial applications; and reviewing and providing guidance on available and emerging methods for uncertainty analysis in CCS techno-economic studies.

Publication Summary

The new White Paper marks a collaboration between workers at several renowned organisations and research institutes. The three areas it covers are: 1. Towards improved cost guidelines for advanced low-carbon technologies A framework is presented for estimating the future “Nth-of-a-kind” (NOAK) cost of advanced technologies that are currently at early pre-commercial stages of development. The framework distinguishes between two types of question that commonly motivate such a cost analysis: “What If” questions about the hypothetical cost of a technology that meets specified R&D goals; and “What Will” questions regarding the actual expected cost of an advanced technology once it is mature. The latter type of question is of particular interest because of the shortcomings in current methods. 2. Towards improved cost evaluation of carbon capture and storage from industry Extensive studies have investigated the techno-economic performance of CCS applied to industrial sources, with wide differences in cost estimates observed. While this is due in part to differences in the cases studied and the choice of capture technology, a significant part arises from aspects related to cost assessment methods and assumptions. Building on a previous CCS costing guideline paper , this chapter aims to contribute to the development of improved guidelines for cost evaluation of CCS from industrial applications. 3. Toward improved guidelines for uncertainty analysis of carbon capture and storage techno-economic studies This chapter reviews and provides guidance on available and emerging methods for uncertainty analysis in CCS techno-economic studies. It is intended to help accelerate continued methods development and their application to more robust and meaningful CCS performance and costing studies, as well as to provide an essential resource for all those developing, communicating and using CCS costing studies.

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