A review of technologies for carbon capture, sequestration, and utilization: Cost, capacity, and technology readiness

Abstract

The continued rise in anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration has led to calls from experts, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that has estimated that global warming needs to be limited to 1.5 °C above preindustrial levels to avoid the worst effects of climate change, and that carbon neutrality would need to be achieved globally by 2050 to meet this target. Achieving carbon neutrality by mid‐century will rely on successful implementation and widespread adoption of technologies for reducing emissions from large point sources of CO2, direct CO2 capture from the air, as well as storage and utilization technologies that would convert CO2 to a form that would ensure safety and permanency of storage. In this paper, engineering solutions for CO2 capture, utilization, and storage are reviewed with a focus on technology readiness level, and cost. © 2021 Society of Chemical Industry and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Community acceptance and social impacts of carbon capture, utilization and storage projects: A systematic meta-narrative literature review

“…This is problematic as CCUS can encompass a diverse set of technologies and processes with different Technological Readiness Levels (TRL) ranging from level 1 where it is only developed on a theoretical level to level 9 where the technology can be applied in an operating environment [ 59 ]. Capture technologies can include post-combustion, pre-combustion, CO 2 separation technology, oxy-fuel separation, and membrane separation [ 60 , 61 ] and they all have a variety of physical and chemical processes and TRL levels [ 18 , 62 – 64 ]. For the transportation stage of the captured CO 2, pipelines, ship, and truck transportation are the main technologies [ 65 ] with pipelines being a mature technology and ship transportation being in the demonstration and large prototype stage [ 63 ].…”

Navigating within the Safe Operating Space with Carbon Capture On-Board

“… 32 We design a conventional 44 carbon capture plant that can be installed on-board by retrofitting the current ship architecture without significant changes. Compared to the commercially available alternatives, such as solid adsorbents or membranes, the advantages of this technology are the high technology readiness level and associated know-how that lead to a straightforward installation and high efficiency, 45 at the expense of a considerable space reduction on-board due to the large-scale system required. At this point, the exhaust gas that contains mainly CO 2 as an impurity is first sent to a flash to separate the wastewater and then enters the absorption column on the bottom tray.…”

Understanding the embeddedness of individuals within the larger system to support the energy transition

“…However, the IPCC (2022) also recognizes that new technologies are only part of the solution. Reliance on technological solutions is related to problems such as technology readiness, risks associated with certain technologies, and technology mainstreaming (Creutzig et al 2021;Kazemifar 2022). Due to the limitations of technological solutions and market-based mechanisms more attention has been placed on the demand-side and behavioral change to achieve the 1.5 °C target (Steffen et al 2018;Creutzig et al 2021;IPCC 2022).…”