Exploring tradeoffs in merged pipeline infrastructure for carbon dioxide integration networks

Carbon integration aims to identify appropriate CO₂ capture, allocation, and utilization options, given a number of emission sources and sinks. Numerous CO₂-using processes capture and convert emitted CO₂ streams into more useful forms. The transportation of captured CO₂, which poses a major design challenge, especially across short distances. This paper investigates new CO₂ transportation design aspects by introducing pipeline merging techniques into carbon integration network design. For this, several tradeoffs, mainly between compression and pipeline costs, for merged pipeline infrastructure scenarios have been studied. A modified model is introduced and applied in this work. It is found that savings on pipeline costs are greatly affected by compression/pumping levels. A case study using two different pipe merging techniques was applied and tested. Backward branching was reported to yield more cost savings in the resulting carbon network infrastructure. Moreover, both the source and sink pressures were found to greatly impact the overall cost of the carbon integration network attained via merged infrastructure. It was found that compression costs consistently decreased with increasing source pressure, unlike the pumping and pipeline costs.