Project: Costing CCS Technologies

Research Team: Sarah Bashadi, Howard Herzog and Randall Field

Summary:
As carbon capture and sequestration projects progress in technical design and get closer to large scale demonstrations, a more complete understanding of the process economics becomes useful in order to compare alternate technologies. This research aims to generate cost estimates of CO2 capture plants, and in the process, identify the most important process parameters that have the greatest impact on the cost of both pre- and post-combustion CO2 capture areas.

The Aspen Economic Evaluation ("Icarus") simulation tool is being deployed to investigate the cost of the acid gas removal unit in both IGCC and PC power plants. Icarus generates capital cost estimates of the process designs using built-in databases of industry costs and design practices. This research is also investigating the economics of partial capture for both pre- and post-combustion CO2 capture using Icarus.

Publications:
Bashadi, S. and H. Herzog, "Using Auxiliary Gas Power for CCS Energy Needs in Retrofitted Coal Power Plants," presented at the 10th International Conference on Greenhouse Gas Control Technologies, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, September (2010). <PDF>

Bashadi, S., "Using Auxiliary Gas Power for CCS Energy Needs in Retrofitted Coal Power Plants," M.I.T. Masters Thesis, June (2010). <PDF>