ADEME’s Energy, environmental and technico-economic analysis of the most promising CO2 technologies
The Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), applied jointly with other mitigation solutions, could ultimately greatly reduce the amount of CO2 emitted by heavy industries and power plants. In addition to geological storage, CO2 may be used as a raw material for green chemistry. It is already used today in the agri-food industry, in the chemical industry, for industrial applications (coolants, solvents, etc.) or EOR/EGR (Enhanced Oil/Gas Recovery). The potential supply of anthropogenic CO2 is very much larger than potential demand. The main issue in using CO2 consists in finding new applications based on breakthrough technology thus increasing the volumes involved.
The objective of this study was to review the CO2 technologies to manufacture fuel, chemicals and materials in order to have a better view of their potential development for the next 15 years and the actions to be implemented at French level to promote emergency.
For this, the study focuses on two main points:
- Investigate existing and emerging uses of CO2 and review the potential to capture and reuse CO2 for industrial applications. It takes into account the mid and longer term application of a number of promising new technologies that are still in the initial stages of their technical development. This inventory includes a preliminary assessment of their performance, advantages and disadvantages, a list of major R & D projects and a market analysis summary of leading products derived therefrom. Based on these factors, three of the most promising routes to 2030 have been selected for further analysis.
- After the selection of three CO2 technologies, each process was modeled to assess more accurately their energy, environmental and economic performance and to compare these performances to conventional petrochemical routes.
Finally, the aim of the modeling work is to answer the following questions:
Are CO2 technologies enable to reduce CO2 emissions? To at what extent are the products of these processes low-carbon? Are the products of these processes competitive with the petrochemicals? If not, under what conditions could they be?