Techno-economic and environmental comparison of carbon capture for standalone retrofitting and CO2 hubs in a coal-fueled power complex

Environmental concerns are one of the top priorities of industrial sectors with hard-to-eliminate emissions, in Brazil, the use of fossil resources in power plants needs solutions to reach emission goals and post-combustion carbon capture, one of the most used strategies for CO2 abatement, is suitable for 78% of the stationary carbon sources. Two different scenarios were evaluated by techno-economic and environmental analysis, these scenarios were: (i) standalone retrofit, which refers to integrating one CCUS unit to the larger power plant in a complex; and (ii) strategically placed hubs of CO2 to address more and minor carbon sources. The results show that in terms of energy penalty is better to operate only under Standalone Scenario. However, there is a preference for working with CO2 hubs, based on 60% lower levelized costs of avoided emissions, and up to 88% lower emission factors, even with its larger Total Expenses (TOTEX). It was found that more than two times the level of emissions can be avoided using CO2 hubs in comparison to the Standalone Scenario. Moreover, the analysis referent to effects of the carbon market showed that the current system is far away from assist and even more to be a valuable incentive to decarbonization.