Using Infrastructure Optimization to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Oil Sands Extraction and Processing

The Alberta oil sands are a significant source of oil production and greenhouse gas emissions, and their importance will grow as the region is poised for decades of growth. We present an integrated framework that simultaneously considers economic and engineering decisions for the capture, transport, and storage of oil sands CO₂ emissions. The model optimizes CO₂ management infrastructure at a variety of carbon prices for the oil sands industry. Our study reveals several key findings. We find that the oil sands industry lends itself well to development of CO₂ trunk lines due to geographic coincidence of sources and sinks. This reduces the relative importance of transport costs compared to nonintegrated transport systems. Also, the amount of managed oil sands CO₂ emissions, and therefore the CCS infrastructure, is very sensitive to the carbon price; significant capture and storage occurs only above 110$/tonne CO₂ in our simulations. Deployment of infrastructure is also sensitive to CO₂ capture decisions and technology, particularly the fraction of capturable CO₂ from oil sands upgrading and steam generation facilities. The framework will help stakeholders and policy makers understand how CCS infrastructure, including an extensive pipeline system, can be safely and cost-effectively deployed

Table_1_The performance of solvent-based direct air capture across geospatial and temporal climate regimes.DOCX

IntroductionLiquid-solvent direct air capture (DAC) is a prominent approach for carbon dioxide removal but knowing where to site these systems is challenging because it requires considering a multitude of interrelated geospatial factors. Two of the most pressing factors are: (1) how should DAC be powered to provide the greatest net removal of CO2 and (2) how does weather impact its performance?.MethodsTo investigate these questions, this study develops a process-level model of a liquid-solvent DAC system and couples it to a 20-year dataset of temperature and humidity conditions at a ~9km resolution across the contiguous US.Results and discussionWe find that the amount of CO2 sequestered could be 30% to 50% greater than the amount of CO2 removed from the atmosphere if natural gas is burned on site to power DAC, but that the optimal way to power DAC is independent of capture rate (i.e., weather), depending solely on the upstream GHG intensity of electricity and natural gas. Regardless of how it is powered, air temperature and humidity conditions can change the performance of DAC by up to ~3x and can also vary substantially across weather years. Across the continuous US, we find that southern states (e.g., Gulf Coast) are preferrable locations for a variety of reasons, including higher and less variable air temperature and relative humidity. Lastly, we also find the performance of liquid-solvent DAC calculated with monthly means is within 2% of the estimated performance calculated with hourly data for more than a third of the country, including in the states with weather most favorable for liquid-solvent DAC.</p