Lifetime of carbon capture and storage as a climate-change mitigation technology

PNAS April 3, 2012 vol. 109 no. 14 5185-5189

Lifetime of carbon capture and storage as a climate-change mitigation technology

Michael L. Szulczewski a, Christopher W. MacMinn b, Howard J. Herzog c, and Ruben Juanes a,d

Departments of:

A Civil and Environmental Engineering

B Mechanical Engineering,

C Energy Initiative, and

D Center for Computational Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139

Abstract

CCS may be critical for the continued use of fossil fuels in a carbon-constrained world.  However, the deployment of CCS has been hindered by uncertainty in geologic storage capacities and sustainable injection rates, which has contributed to the absence of concerted government policy.

Authors clarify the potential of CCS to mitigate emissions in the United States by developing a storage-capacity supply curve that derived from the fluid mechanics of CO₂ injection and trapping. It incorporates injection-rate constraints. Authors show that storage supply is a dynamic quantity that grows with the duration of CCS. They interpret the lifetime of CCS as the time for which the storage supply curve exceeds the storage demand curve from CO₂ production. They show that in the United States, if CO₂ production from power generation continues to rise at recent rates, then CCS can store enough CO₂ to stabilize emissions at current levels for at least 100 y. This suggests that the large-scale implementation of CCS is a geologically viable climate-change mitigation option in the United States over the next century.

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