Study: common CO₂ infrastructure lowers project costs
A common carbon infrastructure will significantly reduce project-specific costs and is the key to harnessing higher carbon flows in a wider industrial ecosystem focused on product processing and permanent storage of carbon dioxide.
Finland has excellent potential for capturing carbon dioxide from the forestry and energy industries, especially from biomass, i.e. biogenic carbon dioxide. Large point sources generate about 30 million tonnes of biogenic carbon dioxide annually.
- Plans for a number of carbon capture projects are already underway across the country. The latest announcement was made last week on carbon capture and storage. Finland is far from European carbon storage sites and the future carbon market, so the use of common logistics solutions is particularly important for us in terms of investment decisions and the development of the entire industrial ecosystem," says Erika Laajalahti, Bioenergy's Industry Manager.
A recent study by VTT examines the potential of carbon logistics to promote capture, use and storage value chains. Carbon dioxide infrastructure includes the necessary interim storage of carbon dioxide inland and on the coast, and transport via pipelines, railways or trucks. In the storage value chain, transport to the final destination is by ship. Infrastructure is of particular importance for projects where CO2 cannot be extracted or stored in the vicinity of the installation. The study identified nine regional CO2 hubs that could share a common infrastructure and have an annual CO2 capture capacity of about 25.2 million tonnes of CO2. Based on these hubs, three different scenarios for the infrastructure and logistics needs for carbon capture, use and storage in 2040 have been developed.
- Sharing common infrastructure would reduce the cost of projects by 30% on average, while allowing more projects to participate in capture and use or storage. There is great potential for making use of existing infrastructure. Using the existing rail network to transport carbon dioxide appears to be a cost-effective option. Pipeline transport is a cheaper option for shorter distances when the capacity is sufficiently large," says Lauri Kujanpää, head of the research team at VTT.
Infrastructure investment costs for the whole system range between €3.7 billion and €4.7 billion in the scenarios, with the lowest costs in the scenario focusing on beneficial use, where the need for transport is lower. The study underlines that the potential for biogenic CO2 capture in Finland is significantly higher than the needs of planned CO2 recovery projects and the potential for storage through mineralisation. The amount of carbon dioxide does not therefore limit the significant scaling up of use and storage.
