Cost Analysis for CO₂ Reduction Pathways

It has been widely acknowledged that addressing the issue of climate change should focus on reducing, and ideally eliminating, the influx of CO₂ to the atmosphere. This has led to the emergence of various CO₂reducing technologies, which differ in their economic and environmental performances. Considering only one side of the problem may be misleading, so this work introduces a novel high-level cost analysis methodology which assesses the different CO₂ reduction options based on CO₂ marginal abatement cost - MAC (an indicator that integrates environmental and economic performances). The study contributes to the existing literature by accounting for the impact of the temporal variations in power demand and renewable energy sources on the MAC of the considered options. The proposed approach is demonstrated through an analysis that explores integrated pathways for CO₂ reduction through CCUS technologies and renewable energy technologies. Energy storage is considered for the intermittent renewable energy options. The results for the different scenarios are combined on a Mini-MAC curve, a recently developed cost analysis tool for planning CO₂ reduction pathways, in which significant insights on the economics of the CO₂ reduction are demonstrated and analyzed.