Carbon capture and storage from industrial sources

Abstract

The industrial sector is responsible for 21% of all global carbon dioxide emissions, and, as such, emissions mitigation is as important in this sector as in the power generation sector. Individual industries are sufficiently diverse that bespoke capture strategies must be created for them, with different technologies more appropriate for different industries. One major difference between industrial and power carbon capture and storage (CCS) is that industries often have numerous sources of varying sizes and CO2 concentration, requiring some degree of aggregation or multiple capture units in order to capture large proportions of flue gases, implying an important trade-off between capture rate and cost. Within the chemical manufacturing industries, there exist streams of high-purity CO2 which can be used for demonstration CCS schemes at a lower cost than other flue streams, and as a first mover towards wide scale deployment. However, attempting to calculate the cost of industrial CCS is difficult since there are a wide range of reported costs from literature, with little consensus even within technologies for the same industry. Policy challenges remain broadly similar to those encountered in the power industry, though due to the global markets for industrial products, some market mechanism would be required in the event of unilateral decarbonisation in order not to penalise first-mover entities.