LARGE-SCALE CCS INFRASTRUCTURE MODELING VIA SIMCCS3.0

An optimal carbon capture and storage (CCS) infrastructure is critical to facilitate wider deployment of commercial and large-scale CCS projects. This work focuses on a challenging CSS infrastructure design problem involving a large number of CO₂ point sources and potential storage sites in the U.S. We perform optimization calculations for large-scale CCS infrastructure including the pipeline networks (with pipeline routes and sizes), and conduct related economic analysis with SimCCS^3.0, which is the latest version of the open-source integrated CCS infrastructure network design software. Our objective is to minimize the total costs by considering CO₂ capture/storage locations, geologic CO₂ storage site locations and capacities, and dynamic evolution of CO₂ capture amounts to account for evolving CO₂ emissions scenarios.

In SimCCS, the core CCS infrastructure design problem is structured as a mixed-integer linear programming problem by selecting the optimal pipeline routes, searching CO₂ source capture and storage locations, and determining the corresponding CO₂ capture amounts to meet desired CO₂ emission reduction targets. SimCCS^3.0, the latest version of SimCCS, includes new capabilities such as accounting for temporal evolution of CO₂ emissions, ability to utilize existing CO₂ pipelines and taking into considerations energy justice (EJ) issues during pipeline network optimization modeling. These new capacities in SimCCS^3.0 are applied to optimize the large-scale CCS infrastructure problems across various regions in the US. Our talk will provide details of new capabilities in SimCCS and results of its application to regional CCS infrastructure problems.