Systematic multi-period carbon integration in an industrial city

Global awareness of the effects of anthropogenic carbon footprint has resulted in proposals for ambitious reduction targets. Commonly, proposals for carbon footprint reduction solutions fall into one of the three areas: improvements in energy efficiency, the use of renewables and less carbon intensive fuels, and Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CSS). On an industrial city scale, additional opportunities for utilization are accessible to convert carbon dioxide into value added products in close proximity. Utilizing carbon dioxide through conversion into fuel, algae, polymers or another value added products could reduce the overall capture costs and lessen the economic burden that prevents emissions cuts. The concept of carbon integration has recently emerged and a process integration approach presented to determine cost efficient allocations of carbon dioxide sources to potential carbon dioxide sink processes to achieve footprint targets. Since carbon footprint reduction efforts typically aim at achieving cuts by a future date, this paper presents a multi-period planning approach to explore carbon integration options over a planning horizon with time-dependent carbon constraints. The approach introduced in this work enables cost optimal source-sink mapping that takes into account the improvements in carbon capture technology and expansion of the industrial city over time. A case study is presented to illustrate the approach by exploring two alternative carbon reduction target policies.