Techno-economic Assessment of CO₂ Electrolysis

Techno-economic Assessment of CO₂ Electrolysis: How Interdependencies between Model Variables Propagate Across Different Modeling Scales

Bagemihl, I. (TU Delft ChemE/Product and Process Engineering)
Cammann, Lucas (Student TU Delft)
Pérez-Fortes, Mar (TU Delft Energie and Industrie)
van Steijn, V. (TU Delft ChemE/Product and Process Engineering)
van Ommen, J.R. (TU Delft ChemE/Product and Process Engineering)

2023

The production of base chemicals by electrochemical conversion of captured CO₂ has the potential to close the carbon cycle, thereby contributing to a future energy transition. With the feasibility of low-temperature electrochemical CO₂ conversion demonstrated at lab scale, research is shifting toward optimizing electrolyser design and operation for industrial applications, with target values based on techno-economic analysis. However, current techno-economic analyses often neglect experimentally reported interdependencies of key performance variables such as the current density, the faradaic efficiency, and the conversion. Aiming to understand the impact of these interdependencies on the economic outlook, we develop a model capturing mass transfer effects over the channel length for an alkaline, membrane electrolyser. Coupling the channel scale with the higher level process scale and embedding this multiscale model in an economic framework allows us to analyze the economic trade-off between the performance variables. Our analysis shows that the derived target values for the performance variables strongly depend on the interdependencies described in the channel scale model. Our analysis also suggests that economically optimal current densities can be as low as half of the previously reported benchmarks. More generally, our work highlights the need to move toward multiscale models, especially in the field of CO₂ electrolysis, to effectively elucidate current bottlenecks in the quest toward economically compelling system designs.

CO electrolysis
First-principle electrolyser model
Multiscale modeling
Optimization
Techno-economic analysis

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:24afb923-66e7-46a1-a2f9-8099cafd0d1d

https://doi.org/10.1021/acssuschemeng.3c02226

2168-0485

ACS Sustainable Chemistry and Engineering, 11 (27), 10130-10141

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2023 I. Bagemihl, Lucas Cammann, Mar Pérez-Fortes, V. van Steijn, J.R. van Ommen