Whether CCS technologies will exacerbate the water crisis in China? —A full life-cycle analysis

Lin Yang, Haodong Lv, Dalin Jiang, Jingli Fan, Xian Zhang, Weijun He, Jinsheng Zhou and Wenjing Wu

Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 2020, vol. 134, issue C

Abstract: Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is an indispensable technology for achieving emission reduction targets, but it is a resource-intensive process requiring a large amount of water. Based on the full life-cycle analysis, this paper firstly reviews the existing research regarding not only the water withdrawal and consumption for pulverized coal (PC), nature gas combined cycle (NGCC), and integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) power plants, but also the water production resulting from CO2-enhanced water recovery (CO2-EWR). And then a case study is conducted using the practical data of 35 PC power plants satisfying source-sink matching principle. We found that: (1) CCS can reduce 140 Mt/a CO2 emissions with a capture rate of 90%, whereas water withdrawal will increase by 174.9%, and water consumption will increase by 150.5% (without EWR) and 36.9% (with EWR). Obviously, the CO2-EWR can drastically reduce water consumption. (2) Capture process contributes most to the water usage. Particularly, PC with circulating cooling requires plenty of water while the increase rate only doubles with CCS. By contrast, although water withdrawal for PC with air cooling is relatively small, the increase rate expands 9 times due to cooling the high-temperature flue gas during capture process. (3) The annual water withdrawal in Ordos Basin and Bohai Bay Basin increases by 347% and 131%, respectively, while water consumption increases only by 30.1% and 45.6%, respectively. Overall, enhancing the condensate recovery treatment during the capture process and the CO2-EWR during the storage process can be considered to deal with water scarcity challenge.

Keywords: Carbon capture and storage; Water withdrawal; Water consumption; CO2-Enhanced water recovery; Full life cycle (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032120306626
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:rensus:v:134:y:2020:i:c:s1364032120306626

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/600126/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... 600126/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.rser.2020.110374

Access Statistics for this article

Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews is currently edited by L. Kazmerski

More articles in Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().