Addressing carbon management challenges

Carbon management involves reducing CO₂ emissions or the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere through carbon capture technologies, valorizing captured CO₂, and sequestering CO₂. Taken together, these processes are referred to as carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS). The carbon management umbrella also covers the development of policies and markets that can incentivize reductions in CO₂ emissions, the removal of CO₂ from the atmosphere, the use of CO₂ byproducts, and long-term CO₂ storage.

Power plants and hard-to-abate industries (cement, steel, chemicals, and long-distance transportation) that rely on fossil fuels for energy produce a substantial fraction of contemporary CO₂ emissions, and combustion waste streams are key targets for capturing concentrated CO₂ before it reaches the atmosphere. Even when such capture occurs, the disposition of the CO₂ is a challenge though. CO₂ can also be removed from the atmosphere, although carbon dioxide removal (CDR) can be energy-intensive and expensive (for example, direct air capture), hard to scale (for example, geologic methods), or even controversial (for example, altering ocean chemistry for marine CDR). Valorizing captured CO₂ as graphite, carbon fiber, and other products is already technically feasible, but there is not yet a large or profitable market for valorized products. All the CO₂ ever sequestered permanently in underground installations onshore or beneath the shallow ocean represents only an estimated 1% of annual CO₂ emissions. Storing even one year of global CO₂ emissions would require an unrealistic expansion of current sequestration capacity.

Within this challenging CCUS landscape, rigorous lifecycle analyses and techno-economic assessments are required to determine whether proposed technologies and approaches would deliver genuine emission reductions and be economically viable. Every aspect of CCUS could benefit from the development of new technologies and from realistic evaluations of how much CO₂ can truly be captured, valorized, or stored. Policy studies can inform carbon management best practices by recommending emissions targets, optimal carbon market design, and regulatory frameworks for CCUS.

Approach

At MITEI, we have long contributed to advancing research on carbon management. This broad range of expertise allows us to simultaneously advance carbon management projects focused on fundamental research, technology development, synthesis of technical and economic information, and evaluation of carbon policy and markets.

Carbon capture: Our projects devise new technologies to capture CO₂ from air and wastewater and investigate monitoring, reporting, and verification for CDR. Our consortium leads multiple projects evaluating the technical and economic aspects of industrial carbon hubs. The consortium is also sponsoring a synthesis of data on realistic carbon capture costs and performance estimates for hard-to-abate industries.

Carbon utilization: Both MITEI’s Future Energy Systems Center and our member companies are sponsoring projects on CO₂ valorization and potential markets.

Carbon sequestration: Research funded by MITEI also evaluates carbon sequestration, including high-fidelity monitoring of carbon injection sites, the trade-offs associated with using agricultural waste to sequester carbon vs. converting it to biofuels, and assessments of carbonate rocks as long-term sequestration sites.

Policy and markets: We sponsor an analysis of the carbon border adjustment mechanism proposed by the European Union and the cost of reducing CO₂ emissions by one additional ton (marginal cost of abatement). We also collaborate with the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research to examine state-level decarbonization policies in the U.S. to discern their effects on CO₂ emission reductions and energy affordability.

In addition, MITEI Senior Research Engineer Howard Herzog has published two seminal monographs on CCUS and is widely regarded as one of the field's leading experts.

Taken together, these efforts position MITEI to provide the rigorous, independent analysis that decision makers need to accelerate the deployment of effective carbon management solutions.