The role of industrial carbon capture and storage (CCS) in emission mitigation

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology is an important option in the portfolio of emission mitigation technologies in scenarios that lead to deep reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions consistent with limiting increases in global average surface air temperature to 2 degrees Celsius (2C). Industrial CCS applications are more challenging to analyze than CCS in the power sector -- mainly due to the vast heterogeneity in industrial and fuel processes. Our study focuses on the cement industry and provides the estimated costs associated with several CCS options: coal-fired post-combustion capture (PCC), natural gas-fired PCC, and Cryogenic Carbon Capture (CCC). We explore regional cost estimates with variations in costs of capital and fuels to provide a basis for regional and global projections of industrial CCS deployment. We offer a methodology for incorporating the CCS cost information into energy-economic and integrated assessment models. Our methodology can be applied to other applications of CCS in the industrial sector. We illustrate our method by introducing the industrial CCS options into the MIT EPPA model, a global energy-economic model that provides a basis for the analysis of long-term energy deployment, and we discuss different scenarios for industrial CCS deployment in different parts of the world. We tested in the EPPA model the potential for industrial CCS under the assumptions that CCS is the only mitigation option for deep GHG emission reduction in industry and that negative emission options are not available for other sectors of the economy. Overall, industrial CCS enables the continued use of energy-intensive goods with large reductions in global and sectoral emissions. We find that in scenarios with stringent climate policy, CCS in the industry sector is a key mitigation option, and our approach provides a path to projecting the deployment of industrial CCS across industries and regions.