Abstract

Economic Evaluation of the Geological Storage of CO2 in Japan
Journal of the Mining and Materials Processing Institute of Japan, 124, 37-43, 2008.
Akimoto Keigo, Takagi Masato

The official discussion on the post-Kyoto framework and target of CO2 emissions reductions began. In order to stabilize atmospheric CO2 emissions, the world should tackle to require deep cuts of CO2 emissions. CO2 capture and storage (CCS) technology is expected to play an important role in the deep cuts. This paper summarizes the cost of the geological storage of CO2 in Japan in order to consider future research, development and deployment (RD&D) from the viewpoint of the economics of CCS; these would be based on the information of the obtained cost structure. According to the analysis results, the costs, particularly those of the transportation by pipeline and of CO2 injection, strongly depend on the scale of the facilities. Therefore, the distance of the transportation of CO2 should be minimized in the case of small-scale storage, particularly in Japan. A mixed-integer programming model has been developed to take into account the adverse effects arising from the scale of economy with regard to the transportation and injection cost for the geological storage of CO2. The model is designed to evaluate CCS and other CO2 mitigation technologies in the energy systems of Japan. With all these adverse effects due to the scale of economy, the geological storage of CO2 will still be one of the important options for CO2 emission reduction in Japan for most of the analyzed cases in this study.