Renewable energy, carbon capture & sequestration and hydrogen solutions as enabling technologies for reduced CO2 energy transition at a national level: an application to the 2030 Italian national energy scenarios

Abstract

Globally, climate change, fossil fuel depletion and greenhouse emissions are fundamental problems requiring massive effort from the international scientific community to be addressed and solved. Following the Clean Energy for all Europeans Package (CEP) guidelines, the Italian Government has established challenging and tight objectives both on energy and climate matter to be targeted by 2030. Accordingly, research activities on different topics are carried out in Italy, looking at the installation of intermittent renewable energy systems (IRES), implementation of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) on existing power plants and hydrogen technology and infrastructure penetration for accomplishing the end-users demands. The optimal integration of the above-mentioned technologies is one of the most effective weapons to address these objectives. The paper investigates different energy scenarios for meeting the Italian National Energy and Climate Plan (NECP) 2030 targets showing how the combined implementation of around +12 GW of IRES and +6 GW of electrolyzers compared to the national estimates simultaneously with the CCS of around 10 Mt of CO2 per year can reduce the CO2 emissions up to about 247 Mt/year. Thanks to the adoption of the well-established software platform EnergyPlan, the integration of IRES plants, CCS and hydrogen-based technologies have been explored, and the most successful results for concurrently reducing the impact of industrial, transport, residential and energy sectors and mitigating the greenhouse emissions substantially relies on the diversifications. Results show both the technical and economic convenience of a 2030 energy scenario which implements properly hydrogen, IRES and CCS penetration in the energy system, meeting the NECP 2030 targets and maintaining both the over-generation of the power plants below 5 TWh and the initial capital expenditure to be sustained for this scenario to occur below +80% compared to the 2019 energy scenario.