Integrated systems analysis and technological findings for carbon capture and storage deployment
By: by Jeffrey Marvin Bielicki
Contributors: John F. Kennedy School of Government
Published: 2009
Language: eng
Number of pages: 218
Subjects: Carbon dioxide mitigation; Technological innovations; Carbon sequestration
Description: Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is a technology that will be grafted on to the industrial organization of carbon dioxide (CO2) production and connect it to the geologic organization of viable CO 2 reservoirs. CCS is a technology that couples together CO 2 capture technologies, CO 2 transportation technologies, and CO 2 storage technologies over space. Each of these technologies is also composed of technologies, and the characteristics of the deployment of CCS as an integrated system of these nested, interlinked, and hierarchical technologies will be influenced by the structures of these technologies and of their interactions, just as it will influence, and be influenced by, the economic, political, regulatory, and social contexts into which it is deployed. This dissertation investigates the deployment of CCS with a focus on how the system at one level results from the interactions between components of the system at deeper levels. Chapter 2 presents a coupled engineering-economic geospatial optimization model that simultaneously and optimally makes seven decisions about how the integrated CCS system should be deployed over space, based on the costs, capacities, and spatial orientation of CO 2 sources and reservoirs and the social and physical topography between them.

This model, SimCCS, is the first deployment model to simultaneously and optimally deploy the whole system including networked infrastructure that is realistically routed. Chapter 3 uses SimCCS to investigate the spatial returns to scale for the integrated system and determine how these returns to scale result from the tradeoffs - such as scale, spatial proximity, and the distribution of capacities - inherent to the deployment of the integrated system. Chapter 3 demonstrates that the spatial variability of costs and capacities significantly influences the returns to scale for the integrated system, that it is possible to over-centralize and over-decentralize CCS activities, and that the co-location of CO 2 capture and storage is not necessarily desirable. Chapter 4 focuses on CO2 storage technology, demonstrates that the experience with similar activities that inject CO 2 into geologic reservoirs has generated technological learning that has increased productivity, and shows how the transfer, or spillover, of this learning has been limited to the projects that generated it.
Notes: Thesis advisors: John P. Holdren, William C. Clark.

Dissertation acceptance certificate signed by: William C. Clark, Chair; William W. Hogan, John P. Holdren (Chair until 1/20/09), Richard J. Zeckhauser.

"May 2009."

Thesis (Ph.D., Granted by the Committee on Higher Degrees on Public Policy)--Harvard University, 2009.

Includes bibliographical references.