Planning tool for CO2 value chains
During the planning of traditional gas power plants one should take into consideration three different energy systems in the investment analyses: the gas supply to the plant, electricity delivery to the central network as well as possible heat delivery to local buyers. A newly developed tool from SINTEF Energy Research makes it possible to also include value chains for the capture, transport and storage of CO2 all in the same analysis.
For several years SINTEF Energy Research AS has been developing a new software tool - “eTransport” - for planning energy systems that include interaction and/or competition between several different energy carriers. The main task of this tool is to calculate the optimal investments during a planning period of 20 -30 years to bring the available energy to the end-user in such quantities and in such form that the needs of the end-user are covered in an economically and environmentally friendly manner. Today’s version is able to optimise the most current forms of energy such as electricity, district heating, gas, waste and biomass, including the conversion between these. The tool is not limited to energy transport by power lines/cables or pipes but covers also road, rail and transport by sea.
Several Master of Science students from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) have participated in the project. These students have made significant contributions to the development, especially in their case study work. The latest such contribution was made by Ingrid Velken MSc, who developed and implemented new modules for the capture, transport and storage of CO2 during her combined project work and master’s thesis at SINTEF Energy Research. The supervisor for this work was Professor Bjørn Nygreen at the Department of Industrial Economics and Technology Management, NTNU. The new modules make it possible to analyse the profitability of alternative gas power plant developments with regard to upstream gas supply, delivery of electricity and heat as well as the management of CO2.
Ingrid Velken has developed the following modules for CO2 technologies (see figure on the right):
- Generic CO2 source (industry etc)
- Gas power plant with emissions
- CO2 capture (from power plants or industry)
- CO2 pipeline with compressor
- CO2 liquefaction
- CO2 storage
- CO2 ship
- CO2 load (for example, injection into aquifers or oil reservoirs)
- CO2 market (where CO2 is sold at a given price)
- CO2 injection pump
The modules were developed and tested in the programming language AMPL prior to implementation in the user interface of eTransport together with the other energy models. One of the greatest challenges has been to combine traditional energy flow [MWh/h] with mass transport of CO2 [tonne/h] in the same optimisation. Ingrid Velken carried out two different case studies in eTransport for testing the new modules. The first is a comparison of Tjeldbergodden, Mongstad, Kårstø and Grenland as alternative sites for a new gas power plant with CO2 removal that yields an income from sales of CO2 for injection and enhanced oil recovery. The other case is a more detailed study of various methods of managing CO2 in a possible gas power plant at Tjeldbergodden.
As an example, the first case contains about 450 000 variables and 150 states (possible system designs), and takes less than 3 minutes to solve on a 2 GHz laptop.
The main point of the case studies was to test the functionality of the models, and the quality of the input data for the analyses was not emphasized. This is the reason why we do not present the numerical results of the case studies here.
Ingrid Velken has developed and implemented new modules in “eTransport”. Here she and Bjørn H. Bakken present the user interface of the software.
