Carbon capture and sequestration in power generation: review of impacts and opportunities for water sustainability

Energy, Sustainability and Society, Feb 2018

This article reviews the use of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) as a viable mitigation strategy for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in fossil-fuel power plants and discusses the impacts on the sustainability of freshwater resources. While CCS technology can significantly mitigate anthropogenic GHG emissions, CCS installations are expected to impose new water stresses due to additional water requirements for chemical and physical processes to capture and separate CO2. In addition to these processes, the parasitic loads imposed by carbon capture on power plants will reduce their efficiency and thus require more water for cooling the plant. Groundwater contamination due to CO2 leakage during geologic sequestration is an additional concern when adapting CCS into power plants. Imposing such constraints on the quantity and quality of freshwater resources will influence decisions on the types of energy facilities and threaten the sustainability of water systems. A review of recent studies highlights three main challenges that would impact water sustainability due to CCS installation: (1) water requirements needed for different stages of CCS, (2) changes in groundwater quality due to carbon leakage into geologic formations, and (3) opportunities for using desalinated brine from saline sequestration aquifers to provide new freshwater sources and offset the CCS-induced water stresses. This article also reviews availability and gaps in datasets and simulation tools that are necessary for an improved CCS analysis. Illustrative analyses from two US states, Louisiana and Arizona, are presented to examine the possible consequences of introducing CCS technologies into existing power plants. A basin-scale, water stress framework is applied to estimate the added stresses on freshwater resources due to CCS installations. The scenario-based illustrative examples indicate the need for a full analysis of the inter-relationship between implementing different CCS technologies in the electric generation sector and the water system. Such analyses can be examined in future studies via an integrated energy-water nexus approach. Furthermore, the current article highlights the need for integrating the environmental, economic, and societal aspects of CCS deployment into future assessment of the viability of CCS operations and how to make water systems less vulnerable to CCS impacts.

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Carbon capture and sequestration in power generation: review of impacts and opportunities for water sustainability

Eldardiry and Habib Energy, Sustainability and Society Carbon capture and sequestration in power generation: review of impacts and opportunities for water sustainability Hisham Eldardiry 0 1 Emad Habib 1 0 Currently at University of Washington , Seattle, WA 98195 , USA 1 Department of Civil Engineering & Institute for Coastal and Water Research, University of Louisiana at Lafayette , Lafayette, LA 70504 , USA This article reviews the use of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) as a viable mitigation strategy for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in fossil-fuel power plants and discusses the impacts on the sustainability of freshwater resources. While CCS technology can significantly mitigate anthropogenic GHG emissions, CCS installations are expected to impose new water stresses due to additional water requirements for chemical and physical processes to capture and separate CO2. In addition to these processes, the parasitic loads imposed by carbon capture on power plants will reduce their efficiency and thus require more water for cooling the plant. Groundwater contamination due to CO2 leakage during geologic sequestration is an additional concern when adapting CCS into power plants. Imposing such constraints on the quantity and quality of freshwater resources will influence decisions on the types of energy facilities and threaten the sustainability of water systems. A review of recent studies highlights three main challenges that would impact water sustainability due to CCS installation: (1) water requirements needed for different stages of CCS, (2) changes in groundwater quality due to carbon leakage into geologic formations, and (3) opportunities for using desalinated brine from saline sequestration aquifers to provide new freshwater sources and offset the CCS-induced water stresses. This article also reviews availability and gaps in datasets and simulation tools that are necessary for an improved CCS analysis. Illustrative analyses from two US states, Louisiana and Arizona, are presented to examine the possible consequences of introducing CCS technologies into existing power plants. A basin-scale, water stress framework is applied to estimate the added stresses on freshwater resources due to CCS installations. The scenario-based illustrative examples indicate the need for a full analysis of the inter-relationship between implementing different CCS technologies in the electric generation sector and the water system. Such analyses can be examined in future studies via an integrated energywater nexus approach. Furthermore, the current article highlights the need for integrating the environmental, economic, and societal aspects of CCS deployment into future assessment of the viability of CCS operations and how to make water systems less vulnerable to CCS impacts. CCS; Sustainability; Carbon capture; Water stress; Sequestration; Energy-Water nexus; Carbon emission Background Climate change due to anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) is one of the most significant longterm environmental challenges facing the United States (US) and the world [ 1, 2 ]. Since 1990, the largest source of GHG emissions in the US has been due to carbon dioxide emission (CO2), with the electricity sector accounting for about one third of the US total emissions. GHG emissions from the electricity sector have increased with the growth of electricity demands and with fossil fuels remaining as the dominant source for electricity generation [3]. Figure 1 shows the distribution of power plants in the US that use fossil fuels as the primary source of energy (e.g., natural gas, coal, and petroleum). A wide range of mitigation strategies have been developed to reduce CO2 emissions [ 4 ]. Technological alternatives for reducing CO2 emissions from power plants to the atmosphere include the following: (a) switching to less carbon-intensive fuels, for example natural gas instead of coal; (b) increasing the use of renewable energy sources or nuclear energy, each of which emits little to no net CO2; and (c) capturing and sequestrating CO2 [ 5 ]. The subject of this article will focus on the third option, CO2 capture and sequestration (CCS), as an efficient strategy to limit climate destabilization due to high levels of energy-related CO2 emissions. CCS is a highly promising approach to reducing GHG emissions by capturing CO2 at the site of the power plant, transporting it to an injection site, and sequestrating for long-term storage in suitable formations [ 6, 7 ]. Installation of a CCS unit at thermoelectric plants can efficiently capture about 85–95% of the CO2 processed in a capture plant [ 8, 9 ]. Water is an integral element of CCS processes. Since water is used for cooling and emission scrubbing, deployment of CCS will potentially increase water withdrawals to meet the added needs for chemical and physical processes of capturing and separating large volumes of CO2 [ 10, 11 ]. Thus, the CCS technologie (...truncated)


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Hisham Eldardiry, Emad Habib. Carbon capture and sequestration in power generation: review of impacts and opportunities for water sustainability, Energy, Sustainability and Society, 2018, pp. 6, Volume 8, Issue 1, DOI: 10.1186/s13705-018-0146-3