Carbon Management
From modeling the economics of CO2 capture and storage (CCS) at the global level, to working toward injecting it underground, PNNL's Technology Systems Analysis group continues to push carbon management from modeling to deployment, transforming science into solutions. The carbon management capability resident in Technology Systems Analysis ranges from geospatial and economic modeling to on-the-ground deployment of carbon capture and storage systems.
Modeling
Primary modeling tools used to assess the economic and geographic impacts of climate change mitigation policies and the deployment of specific technologies include the top-down Mini Climate Assessment Model (MiniCAM) and the Battelle CO2-GIS, a bottom-up economic model built within a GIS framework.
The MiniCAM is used for analyses that incorporate assumptions about global climate policy, economic least-cost path selection and heterogeneous adoption of various climate change mitigation strategies, future energy and carbon prices, and other economic and policy factors at a global and national level.
The Battelle CO2-GIS is used to model options for geologic CCS at the national, regional, or sub-regional level by incorporating spatial and aspatial data on large, stationary CO2 sources—including power plants, refineries, natural gas processing facilities, and cement and chemical manufacturing facilities, to name a few—as well as data on potential geologic CO2 storage formations including their areal extents, capacities, value-added oil and gas and their per-ton cost of storage. The CO2-GIS can also be used to calculate per-ton storage costs, including transport, for individual source-sink pairs. This work resulted in the first supply curve for CO2 transport and storage in North America.
By marrying the top-down MiniCAM model and the bottom-up CO2-GIS, analyses can be constructed that begin with a global set of assumptions about climate change policy, carbon price paths and future energy prices and result in a detailed view of how CCS might deploy under these constraints across the individual assets of one sector of one nation's economy.
Deployment
PNNL is proud to play a role in bringing CCS systems off the drawing board and into the board rooms of the world. PNNL's capabilities—including risk assessment, geospatial modeling, project management, and systems design, modeling and integration—have uniquely positioned the group to assist the FutureGen Alliance, a $1 billion partnership that brings together public and private partners—including the governments of the United States and India and major U.S. and international coal and utility companies serving customers on six continents—to build the world's first zero-emissions, coal-fired power plant. The FutureGen facility will be a coal-fired integrated gasification combined-cycle plant that will incorporate advanced electric power generation technologies. Carbon dioxide will be captured before it can be emitted to the atmosphere, and will be compressed and injected into a geologic formation deep beneath the surface of the earth.
Point of Contact: Sriram Somasundaram