The cost of CO2 transport by truck and rail in the United States

Abstract

Transportation of CO2 to storage sites has long been an afterthought in carbon management technologies, with the unspoken assumption that pipelines and ships are the optimal solutions. In addition to legal, political, and public challenges to this notion, there may be situations where alternative transport options such as truck and rail are cheaper. Despite truck and rail transport of CO2 occurring at a significant scale today, there is a comparative lack of economic cost models for these transport modes in the CO2 management literature. We build bottom-up cost estimates for the transportation of CO2 in tankers or intermodal containers moved via trucks or rail using commercially available technologies applied in the United States. We find that existing cost models in the literature for truck and rail transport underestimate total cost. These underestimates are primarily due to excluding the need for buffer storage, upstream liquefaction, downstream reconditioning, and regulatory restrictions from analysis. We find that trucking options are typically cheaper for distances less than ∼400 miles. For truck transport, we find intermodal containers are cheaper than tankers starting at project scales greater than ∼400 kt-CO2/y. For rail transport, tankers are consistently cheaper than intermodals, but this result relies upon the assumption of dedicated unit cars traveling on uncongested routes. Even so, intermodal rail becomes competitive with Tanker Rail at scales over ∼200 kt-CO2/y. The primary cost driver for truck-based transportation is labor. For rail-based transport, the base rate paid to the rail operator represents the largest cost.