Abstract
CCS is a well investigated and fairly promising technology for reducing the emission of carbon dioxide (CO2) to the atmosphere. However, it is rarely implemented in the industry due to its high cost. Therefore, this work proposes a cost optimized CCS chain which can be operated flexibly and safely. For the capture process a post combustion chemical absorption technology is chosen due to its retrofitting possibility to already existing power plants and its low capture cost. In order to find a cost efficient absorption process for different scenarios, the five most promising process configurations from previous work are combined into a superstructure in a rigorous rate based reactive Aspen Plus model. This in turn is optimized by a two-stage stochastic programming approach in Matlab. The optimal supply chain network is identified by a tailor made transshipment model implemented in GAMS, which accounts for the most promising transportation units, storage sites as well as direct utilization locations for one specific power plant in Germany. The optimal capture process contains the following process configurations: absorber intercooling, stripper interheating, cold solvent split (split ratio of 4 %), and vapor recompression. Thereby, the total annualized cost can be decreased from 373 to 361 Mio EUR (3.2 %). The optimal supply chain network suggests to partly utilize the CO2 (0.85 %) and to store the rest in a depleted gas field, whereas the whole amount of CO2 is piped to the storage site and then partly transported to the utilization location by trucks. The total annualized cost for transportation and storage are 53 Mio EUR and 4.4 Mio EUR, whereas the utilization generates a revenue of 4.2 Mio EUR per year. This results in an overall CSS cost of 414.2 Mio EUR per year.