Work

The cost of impurities: A techno-economic assessment on conditioning of captured CO2 to commercial specifications

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: CO 2 capture, utilization, and storage is a key technology to mitigate the climate crisis, and the development of a CO 2 infrastructure is critical for its future large-scale implementation. Successful deployment of a CO 2 infrastructure depends largely on the compatibility between industry links, which is currently limited by unaligned CO 2 purity specifications. Therefore, there is a need to understand the economic and technical implications of purity specifications throughout the whole value chain. This work presents, a highly detailed study encompassing the entire CO 2 conditioning system, including compression, dehydration, liquefaction, and purification. A single, common CO 2 conditioning system derived from operational facilities and designed for post-combustion CO 2 feeds was applied for conditioning of four different feed gases. The investigation includes a techno-economic analysis considering capital and operational expenses for twelve different combinations of CO 2 feed streams and outlet product specifications. The feed sources represent a range of CO 2 purities from high purity to low purity and were derived from post-combustion, pre-combustion, and oxy-fuel combustion processes , while the considered product specifications include CO 2 storage in depleted gas fields , saline aquifer, and utilization in the food industr. For the investigated systems, it is found that low-purity CO 2 was the most expensive source gas to condition to commercial specifications due to a high content of non-condensable gases. The levelized costs for CO 2 conditioning amounted to approximately 25 EUR/t CO 2 , 27 EUR/t CO 2 , 34 EUR/t CO 2 , and 46 EUR/t CO 2 for the investigated high purity, medium-high purity, medium-low purity, and low purity CO 2 cases, respectively. In the investigated cases, only the specifications of low-volatile species were relevant. The impurity limit specifications were relatively close across the investigated commercial specifications, therefore, these did not show significant cost differences. The study clarifies the economic impact on the CO 2 conditioning process from imposing equivalent purity constraints on CO 2 from different sources.

Source: International journal of greenhouse gas control

DOI: 10.1016/j.ijggc.2025.104309