Economic Evaluation of CO2 Storage
and Sink Enhancement Options

In order to plan for potential CO2 mitigation mandates, energy companies need better cost information on CO2 mitigation options, especially storage and sink enhancement options that involve non-energy company operations. One of the major difficulties in evaluating CO2 storage and sink enhancement options is obtaining consistent, transparent, accurate, and comparable economics. The objective of this project was to develop consistent, transparent, accurate, and comparable economics of direct and indirect sequestration of CO2 to allow comparison between alternatives. Primary funding was from DOE.

This project developed life-cycle costs for the major technologies and practices under development for CO2 storage and sink enhancement. The technologies evaluated included options for storing captured CO2 in active oil reservoirs, depleted oil and gas reservoirs, deep aquifers, coal beds, and oceans, as well as the enhancement of carbon sequestration in forests and croplands. The capture costs for a nominal 500 MWe integrated gasification combined cycle plant from an earlier study were combined with the storage costs from this study to allow comparison among capture and storage approaches as well as sink enhancements.

An international group of experts developed economic premises and cost evaluations to allow the comparison of a wide range of CO2 sequestration options. The project team calculated material balances, developed equipment lists and prices, and estimated installation costs. Economic evaluations for this project were estimated to ±25 to 30 percent, with the ability to modify values to be relatively site-specific. The economics of sequestration in this project are consistent with economics of advanced power generation with CO2 capture that the Electric Power Research Institute is developing for DOE. The economic framework also includes life cycle analysis for the various sequestration options—all greenhouse gas emissions from cradle to grave were estimated and considered in the analysis. The economic analysis used spreadsheet models that are flexible enough to allow a wide variation in the range of parameters to be evaluated and the sensitivity cases to be run. The carbon equivalent (CE) life-cycle greenhouse gas (LC GHG) emissions avoided by the capture and storage options assume CO2 capture and injection into storage reservoirs during the 20-year book life of the capture and storage plants and storage of injected CO2 for another 80 years.

Bock121103B.ppt

Final Report