Pinch-based planning of terrestrial carbon management networks

Abstract

Negative emissions technologies (NETs) will be needed to achieve deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate climate change in the coming decades. Enhanced weathering and biochar application are two NETs that are based on the enhancement of naturally occurring processes; compared to other NETs, they have the advantage of relying on mature component technologies. Both technologies offer the prospect of sequestering carbon from the atmosphere at the scale of multiple gigatons per year if deployed commercially via carbon management networks (CMNs). However, planning future CMNs will present similar challenges as optimizing supply chains for current product systems. In this work, a pinch analysis approach for the planning of CMNs based on either enhanced weathering or biochar application is developed. Planning is framed as a source-sink problem typical in process integration (PI) applications, allowing pinch analysis to be applied to determine optimal system targets and synthesize the corresponding CMNs. General principles of pinch analysis are shown to be applicable to the planning problem. Case studies on enhanced weathering and biochar application CMNs are solved to illustrate this approach.