Achieving Negative Emissions: Integration of Sugarcane Crop, Ethanol Biorefinery, Post-Combustion Capture and CO<sub>2</sub> Pipeline for Enhanced Oil Recovery

Abstract

Every day huge amounts of CO2 are released into the atmosphere by enterprises such as biorefineries. In this context, the present work proposes a plausible scenario where a large-scale sugarcane-based biorefinery capture over 92% of its CO2 emissions to be used as enhanced oil recovery (EOR) agent. The study is based on the integration of sugarcane crop–large-scale ethanol biorefinery–post-combustion capture–CO2 pipeline to EOR. As results, the plant obtained a CO2 recover of 91.3% from post-combustion capture, allowing export 5.29 MM tCO2/y. Basic revenues of this project came from ethanol production, electricity sales, and EOR. In addition, four scenarios were investigated considering incomes from the handling of the captured CO2. All scenarios were evaluated in terms of the use of 1 and 2 bbl/tCO2 for EOR, leading to the conclusion that long-term economic sustainability can be assured only for some scenarios and mainly above 2 bbl/tCO2.