CO2nsistent

 

Background

CO₂ capture and utilization has been gaining momentum as academia, industry and governments seek solutions to reduce emissions and create new circular business opportunities. In order to build these new technologies on a solid scientific basis, questions about economic viability, environmental impacts and trade-offs between economics and environment have to be carefully analysed. To enable informed decision-making, systematic assessment is required, involving a combination of techno-economic assessment (TEA) and life cycle assessment (LCA).

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Currently, no standardized TEA and LCA methods have been adopted, so studies cannot easily be compared, risking sub-optimal decisions. Furthermore, interest in the development and adoption of such guidelines has been voiced by the European Commission (e.g. EC SAM HLG) amongst others. Consequently, first-of-a-kind TEA and LCA guidelines for CO₂ utilization were launched in August 2018 as a result of the previous Guideline project funded by the Global CO₂ Initiative and EIT Climate-KIC. These guidelines received broad attention from stakeholders and are already put into practice for example by Carbon XPRIZE.

 

Aim

The aim of CO₂nsistent is to deepen and broaden the current guidelines in a three-year project. CO₂nsistent aims for:

• Further improving the existing guidelines based on feedback from the initial launch phase including addition of further worked examples
• Expanding the scope to include guidance for policy makers, commissioners of studies and other decision makers
• Guidance for conducting low TRL-related assessments
• Integrating TEA & LCA for CCU technologies to allow for analysis of both environmental and economic factors simultaneously and to produce composite environmental-economic performance metrics. Such an analysis can also be useful in determining the effects of prioritising of specific environmental and economic factors over others as part of a structured analytical decision-making process

CO₂nsistent will feature significant stakeholder engagement to ensure that future iterations of the guidelines remain a reflection of best practices as dictated by the assessment community. To be a part of this collaborative approach please contact us for further details.