As part of the United States Department of Energy's Office of Fossil Energy, the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) implements research, development and demonstration (RD&D) that is focused on maximizing system efficiency and performance while minimizing the costs of coal-based power production with carbon capture and storage. In order to evaluate the benefits and market competitiveness of ongoing RD&D, NETL conducts engineering studies to evaluate the cost and performance of plants integrating multiple advanced technologies currently under development. This paper evaluates two different coal conversion pathways -combustion and gasification -and their potential to provide low-cost, low-carbon power from coal.
Understanding the costs of carbon capture and storage (CCS) is essential to understand the role for and potential of CCS technology in addressing climate change, for guidance in research activities aiming to reduce the cost and improve the performance of promising new CCS technologies in different applications. In practice, however, there are many challenges in establishing reliable cost estimates for CCS technologies. To help identify and overcome these challenges, a group of experts from industry, government, academia and other organisations came together in 2011 to form the CCS Cost Network (which came under the aegis of IEAGHG in 2017 [1]). Following discussions at the first CCS Cost Network workshop [1], several members of the workshop steering committee formed a task force to focus on the basic structure of CCS cost estimates. That effort produced a White Paper entitled, "Toward a Common Method of Cost Estimation for CCS at Fossil Fuel Power Plants" [2]. This white paper aimed at overcoming identified pitfalls in CCS cost evaluations for fossil fuel power plants arising from the different methodologies used by various organisations. Towards this aim, the white paper established a common costing methodology and nomenclature, as well as guidelines for CCS cost reporting to improve the clarity and consistency of cost estimates for greenhouse gas mitigation measures. While that work laid the foundation for establishing a common costing methodology for CCS, several important cost issues still remained to be addressed. Building on that earlier work and the interest from additional organisations, the current white paper is an effort to draw up a complementary set of CCS costing guidelines in three complementary areas where further guidelines and better practices are needed, and where efforts are underway to address those topics. This effort is a collaboration among researchers at several industrial research institutes (Electric
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