Technology and System Assessment
Description
The transition to “net-zero-greenhouse-gas-emissions” by 2050 and net-negative beyond 2050 must be planned using solid scientific evidence to design optimal decarbonisation technologies and pathways, underpin investments and decision-making, and avoid lock-in-effects that would hamper reaching climate goals. Hence, technology and systems assessments are key instruments to guide public and private policy and decision making. These assessments include mathematical and process modelling, to analyse technology performance and how process parameters impacts this, techno-economic assessments (TEA) to identify economic implications and life cycle assessments (LCA) to examine environmental consequences. All this information is used in network modelling activities that provide master planning for the decarbonisation of regions, industrial clusters or sectors. At RCCS, we perform technology and system assessments supported by the development of cutting-edge engineering methods to advance this constantly changing research field.
Members
Related projects
Building on our experience of process and system level modelling, as well as life cycle analysis, will identify systems infrastructure, asset and network design options that work at cluster level. Issues such as the right balance of electricity, CCS, hydrogen and heat cascading for a particular cluster will be explored, quantifying the solutions with a range of energetic, economic and environmental metrics. The work will comprise four key academic tasks:
Framework development;
Model and tool development;
Cluster case studies analysis and model refinement;
Model finalisation.
Industrially, the objective is to engage at least two clusters in case studies and results evaluation and use the toolkit to support them in their roadmap development. Technology developers will be able to use the toolkit to gain insights into the potential roles for their technologies for industrial decarbonisation.
The aim of USorb-DAC is to better understand how to scale-up direct air capture while considering affordability and capture performance.
https://usorbdac.hw.ac.uk
The POaET Project (Performance of Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement Technologies) is aiming to provide rigourous assessments of ocean alkalinity enhancement technologies through a combined techno-economic and environmental assessment.
The main goal of the project is the development and scale-up of an absorption-based COy capture technology using aqueous KOH solution coupled with an electrochemical cell employed for the regeneration of the spent alkaline solution. The high purity CO2 stream released can then be utilised for the production of formic acid. This technology is mainly aimed on reducing the CO2 footprint of energy-intensive industries.