Scalable Algorithms for Designing CO2 Capture and Storage Infrastructure

Abstract

CO2 capture and storage (CCS) is a climate change mitigation strategy that aims to reduce the amount of CO2 vented into the atmosphere from industrial processes. Designing cost-effective CCS infrastructure is critical in meeting CO2 emission reduction targets and is a computationally challenging problem. We formalize the computational problem of designing cost-effective CCS infrastructure and detail the fundamental intractability of designing CCS infrastructure as problem instances grow in size. We explore the problem’s relationship to the ecosystem of network design problems, and introduce three novel algorithms for its solution. We evaluate our proposed algorithms against existing exact approaches for CCS infrastructure design and find that they all run in dramatically less time than the exact approaches and generate solutions that are very close to optimal. Decreasing the time it takes to determine CCS infrastructure designs will support national-level scenario analysis, undertaking risk and sensitivity assessments, and understanding the impact of government policies (e.g., tax credits for CCS).