(774d) Whole-Chain CCS System Modelling: Enabling Technology to Help Accelerate Commercialisation and Manage Technology Risk

The commercial implementation of CCS still faces significant challenges. Many of these arise from the fact that the whole chain – and, eventually, whole CO₂ transportation network – needs to be considered as a single system in order to make design and operation decisions that satisfactorily address the commercial imperatives and risk requirements of the various stakeholders along the chain. Even a quick analysis shows that design and operating decisions at the power plant can have a significant effect on storage providers at the other end of the chain, and vice versa. A systems modelling approach is essential, but there are currently no tools that can satisfactorily provide this capability over the whole CCS chain.

In order to address this, a £3m project was commissioned and co-funded by the ETI and project participants, who comprise E.ON, EDF, Rolls-Royce, Petrofac (via its subsidiary CO2DeepStore), Process Systems Enterprise (PSE) and E4tech. The project is aimed at delivering a robust, fully integrated tool-kit that can be used by CCS stakeholders across the whole CCS chain that will be released as a commercially-supported software product at the end of the project.

Because of the requirement for many stakeholders to be able to model areas of the chain beyond their own specific processes (for example, a key requirement for power generators is the ability to investigate the effects on their operation of amine and compression systems attached to their plants), the tool-kit will provide process models for the whole chain. This will also allow it to be used by groups who require a whole-chain view, such as engineering companies or government departments who need to quantify policy decisions.

The tool-kit includes models for conventional generation (pulverised coal and combined cycle gas turbine), new generation (gasification and oxyfuel), solvent-based carbon capture, compression, transmission and injection.  The individual process models are mostly ‘medium-to-high fidelity’: multicomponent streams; equilibrium methods for vapour-liquid separation; comprehensive compressor models allowing multi-stage, multi-section compressors with manufacturers’ curves; and distributed pipeline models for construction of pipeline networks that can take elevation into account. The capture models use rate-based techniques for accurate quantification of chemical and physical capture in order to quantify energy penalties accurately and allow meaningful analysis of transient operations.

Using the system modelling tool-kit it will be possible to look at single areas such as amine plants in detail; investigate partial-chain operations – for example, power generation, capture and compression; or analyse interactions across the whole chain and eventually the whole CO2 transmission network with multiple sources and multiple sinks. 

The tool-kit also caters for interfacing of external software packages such as E.ON’s PROATES, in order to simplify interoperability analysis while allowing companies to preserve existing workflows where necessary. In addition an advanced custom modelling capability means that it is easy to add models of new processes and combine them with existing flowsheeting components.

This presentation describes the status of developments to date in whole chain CCS system analysis and plans to roll the tool-kit software out to the wider ‘CCS community’ following the current testing phase.