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The Water, Energy, and Carbon Dioxide Sequestration Simulation Model (WECSsim). A user's manual

Kobos, Peter H.; Roach, Jesse D.; Klise, Geoffrey T.; Heath, Jason; Dewers, Thomas D.; Malczynski, Leonard A.; Borns, David J.

The Water, Energy, and Carbon Sequestration Simulation Model (WECSsim) is a national dynamic simulation model that calculates and assesses capturing, transporting, and storing CO2 in deep saline formations from all coal and natural gas-fired power plants in the U.S. An overarching capability of WECSsim is to also account for simultaneous CO2 injection and water extraction within the same geological saline formation. Extracting, treating, and using these saline waters to cool the power plant is one way to develop more value from using saline formations as CO2 storage locations. WECSsim allows for both one-to-one comparisons of a single power plant to a single saline formation along with the ability to develop a national CO2 storage supply curve and related national assessments for these formations. This report summarizes the scope, structure, and methodology of WECSsim along with a few key results. Developing WECSsim from a small scoping study to the full national-scale modeling effort took approximately 5 years. This report represents the culmination of that effort. The key findings from the WECSsim model indicate the U.S. has several decades' worth of storage for CO2 in saline formations when managed appropriately. Competition for subsurface storage capacity, intrastate flows of CO2 and water, and a supportive regulatory environment all play a key role as to the performance and cost profile across the range from a single power plant to all coal and natural gas-based plants' ability to store CO2. The overall system's cost to capture, transport, and store CO2 for the national assessment range from $74 to $208 / tonne stored ($96 to 272 / tonne avoided) for the first 25 to 50% of the 1126 power plants to between $1,585 to well beyond $2,000 / tonne stored ($2,040 to well beyond $2,000 / tonne avoided) for the remaining 75 to 100% of the plants. The latter range, while extremely large, includes all natural gas power plants in the U.S., many of which have an extremely low capacity factor and therefore relatively high system's cost to capture and store CO2.

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System-level benefits of extracting and treating saline water from geologic formations during national-scale carbon capture and storage

International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control

Roach, Jesse D.; Heath, Jason; Kobos, Peter H.; Klise, Geoffrey T.

Despite economic, political, legal, and technical challenges, carbon dioxide (CO2) capture and storage (CCS) holds promise as a means to substantially reduce anthropogenic atmospheric emissions of carbon dioxide. One of the technical challenges to CCS is an accurate quantification of the potential geologic storage resource. This analysis uses the publically available national-scale, systems-level Water Energy and Carbon Sequestration simulation model (WECSsim), to show that, depending on assumed boundary conditions, the majority of storage associated with large-scale CCS in the U.S. (on the order of 90-100GT of total reduced emissions) would occur at a small number of well-located sites with favorable geologic properties. WECSsim, through the use of marginal abatement cost curves, shows that under such a scenario, added costs associated with resident saline water extraction, transport, and treatment (SWETT) are justified by resulting increases in carbon dioxide storage efficiency in the geologic formation. This argument is strengthened when geologic uncertainty is taken into consideration. Like an insurance policy, the enhanced carbon dioxide storage efficiency that comes from SWETT adds well-defined costs to reduce potential economic risks associated with overestimates of the available geologic storage resource. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd.

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Results 1–25 of 57
Results 1–25 of 57