Cost Drivers for Post-Combustion CO2 Capture in China
6 Pages Posted: 13 Apr 2019 Last revised: 27 Oct 2020
Abstract
The commercial deployment of carbon capture, utilization and sequestration (CCUS) at power plants is considered to be too expensive today in many parts of the world. The situation may be different in China, where a combination of the structural organization of the power sector, differences in local costs, and the emergence of a national carbon trading market may offer paths to affordable CCUS within the next decade. Given that the power sector in China accounts for about 50% of its national CO2 emissions and about 15% of global anthropogenic CO2, progress in CCUS for the existing coal-fired power plant fleet is an important option for meaningfully reducing CO2 emissions reductions in the near-term while also stimulating development of the offtake infrastructure need for negative emissions approaches in the future.
Literature estimates for the cost of post-combustion CO2 capture from power plants in China range from about 200 to 270 RMB/ton CO2. In this study, we define a set of “China baseline” reference cases and use them to analyze the costs of post-combustion CO2 capture (PCC) at power plants in China. Our analysis clarifies the drivers for differences in performance and cost by separating differences due to technical factors from those due to operations and financing. We find the cost of post-combustion CO2 capture from power plants in China ranges from about 260 to 280 RMB/tCO2 (40-43 USD/tCO2) captured and 390 to 480 RMB/tCO2 (60-74 USD/ tCO2) avoided. This is at the higher end of the range of published literature estimates for China, but significantly lower than the corresponding ranges in the US for nominally the same technological approach. Our analysis confirms the importance of capital savings, identifies the contributions from other significant factors such as fuel costs and power plant utilization, and explores several strategic implications for how these cost drivers might impact the deployment of CCS in China.
The results presented here have been published as two articles in the International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control. The first article focuses on performance and is Q Cui et al. Int J Greenhouse Gas Control 78 (2018) 37-47. The second article is under review at the time of this submission.
Keywords: GHGT-14; CCS; CO2 capture; economics
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