Exploring Tradeoffs in Merged Pipeline Infrastructure for Carbon Dioxide Integration Networks

Sabla Y Alnouri,Dhabia M Al-Mohannadi

doi:10.3390/su12072678

Abstract

Carbon integration aims to identify appropriate CO2 capture, allocation, and utilization options, given a number of emission sources and sinks. Numerous CO2-using processes capture and convert emitted CO2 streams into more useful forms. The transportation of captured CO2, which poses a major design challenge, especially across short distances. This paper investigates new CO2 transportation design aspects by introducing pipeline merging techniques into carbon integration network design. For this, several tradeoffs, mainly between compression and pipeline costs, for merged pipeline infrastructure scenarios have been studied. A modified model is introduced and applied in this work. It is found that savings on pipeline costs are greatly affected by compression/pumping levels. A case study using two different pipe merging techniques was applied and tested. Backward branching was reported to yield more cost savings in the resulting carbon network infrastructure. Moreover, both the source and sink pressures were found to greatly impact the overall cost of the carbon integration network attained via merged infrastructure. It was found that compression costs consistently decreased with increasing source pressure, unlike the pumping and pipeline costs.

Highlights

Increased climate change concerns have resulted in various efforts that aim towards mitigating CO2 emission footprints
This paper discusses the various tradeoffs between compression, pumping, and pipeline costs associated with carbon networks
A case study that involved the exploration of 30 different scenarios was tested for each merging technique, in order to identify which merging technique leads to more cost savings

Summary

Introduction

Increased climate change concerns have resulted in various efforts that aim towards mitigating CO2 emission footprints. This has created pressure on the industrial sector to reduce emissions, especially since stationary industrial sources account for the majority of global emissions. Multiple methods to reduce CO2 emission have been proposed, which include carbon capture utilization and storage (CCUS), fuel reduction, or fuel switching, including the use of renewable energy. Given that industrial emission sources can both be from energy use or as a product from processing activity, deployment of carbon capture sequestration and utilization infrastructure reduction schemes can be effective [2]. Absorption processes were reported as the most utilized option, due to their relatively low cost and high efficiency. This paper presents a novel approach to reduce CCUS transportation cost in industrial clusters through pipeline merging

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