Improving Cost Estimates For Low-Carbon Technologies
Professor Ed Rubin (EPP/MechE), together with a team of 13 other university, industrial, and governmental collaborators, has co-authored a newly released white paper providing comprehensive guidelines for the cost estimation of carbon capture and storage (CCS) and other low-carbon technologies that are crucial to combatting climate change.
“Better understanding of the current and futures costs of these technologies is essential to guide policy choices and research activities aimed at controlling greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and industrial sources, which are major contributors to climate change,” Rubin explains.
“In practice, the ranges of technology options and sources of CO2 emissions pose challenges to reliable and transparent cost estimates for CO2 controls in different applications,” said Rubin. “Cost estimation is especially difficult when it comes to advanced technologies that promise lower costs and better performance, but are still in various stages of pre-commercial development. Researchers and process developers tend to hype new technologies with optimistic projections, making it difficult for policymakers and investors to know what is actually achievable in a given time frame.”
To address this problem, Rubin spearheaded an effort to develop new guidelines that enable more realistic and systematic assessments of the economic potential of new technologies. For example, advanced low-carbon technologies, such as a new carbon capture process or novel power plant designs, are commonly considered to be mature and fully developed for the purposes of techno-economic assessments. Rubin addressed this shortcoming by proposing a new framework for estimating the future (“Nth-of-a-kind”) cost of a successful technology or design that is currently in an early pre-commercial stage of development. According to Rubin, “The results of this approach provide new insights regarding the timeframe and likelihood of cost-competitiveness with existing or other advanced technologies.”
Rubin and fellow researchers have now published their recommendations in a comprehensive white paper titled, “Towards improved guidelines for cost evaluation of carbon capture and storage.” This paper ties together the findings from earlier peer-reviewed journal articles published by Rubin and his colleagues in three main areas: improved cost guidelines for advanced low-carbon energy technologies, cost evaluation of carbon capture and storage in industrial processes, and guidelines for uncertainty analysis in techno-economic studies.
Along with Carnegie Mellon, the team includes researchers from SINTEF Energy Research, Heriot-Watt University, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), the International Energy Agency, the US Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (DOE/NETL), the IEA Greenhouse Gas R&D Programme (IEAGHG), the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, the University of Calgary, the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, and Delft University of Technology.
This international collaboration stems from previous work by Rubin and a group of experts from industry, government and academia who came together in 2011 to form the CCS Cost Network, now under the aegis of IEAGHG. This led to the formation of a task force organized by Rubin to focus on the basic structure of CCS cost estimates for power plants. The group published their first white paper, “Toward a Common Method of Cost Estimation for CCS at Fossil Fuel Power Plants,” in 2013. That document laid the foundation for establishing a common costing method aimed at avoiding the pitfalls Rubin had identified in existing cost evaluations, arising from the different methods and assumptions used by various organizations.
Rubin explained that after the initial white paper was published, a larger team of researchers from the network set out two years ago to provide an expanded set of guidelines in the three important areas noted above, where further guidance and better practices are needed. “Each of these areas represents an opportunity to improve critical aspects of costing that are often overlooked or insufficiently addressed,” Rubin said.
The white paper has now been published on a public access website as well as the websites of EPRI and NETL. It was also featured in a panel session that Rubin chaired at the international GHGT-15 conference this past March—the major biannual conference where approximately 1000 researchers in greenhouse gas control technologies met virtually to exchange information on this timely and important topic.
“This white paper represents a significant step forward in developing reliable and transparent technology cost estimates that are vital to climate change solutions,” Rubin said. “And the paper is already gaining significant traction, with more than 500 downloads in the first week.”
“That really made my day!” he added.
