Final Deliverable W6, D6.4: Coal power plants with carbon capture and storage – A sustainability assessment

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is increasingly gaining attention as a strategy for the abatement
of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. CCS includes the capture of CO2 emissions from electricity
generation plants and/or industrial processes, its transport (by pipeline or ships) and sequestration in
underground reservoirs such as deep aquifers or depleted oil and gas fields. As a novel technology, CCS
is an ideal case study for testing the Prosuite methodology.
The sustainability is tested using the five end-points established in Prosuite: human health, natural
environment, exhaustible resources, social well-being and prosperity. This case study uses the scope
defined across WP3-5 of PROSUITE. The analysis is undertaken in a prospective framework for the year
2030 under the economic scenarios developed in WP2, which themselves are based on the IEA Energy
Technology Perspectives. A key component of the scenarios from WP2 relevant for the economic
analysis of the CCS case is the inclusion of a cost of carbon, which in the main scenario investigated is
taken from the BlueMap scenario of the IEA Energy Technology Perspectives. With the cost of carbon,
coal fired power without carbon capture and storage is more expensive than coal fired power with
carbon capture and storage and viceversa. The tax per kWh for the reference system is €0.07, which is
markedly more than the tax of €0.02 for the prospective system. This is a result of the BLUE Map
scenario assumption of a 110 $/t CO2 tax. In fact, CCS is only cheaper per functional unit when taxes
(including a carbon tax) are included as an input. This indicates that that the technology is
economically “non-sustainable” in the sense that it cannot compete on costs with the reference
technology when a carbon tax is not levied.
For the scenario evaluated, key results can be summarized as follows:
 Implementation of CCS results in lower impact on the human health indicator than in the
reference scenario (without CCS). In both scenarios, the decrease is mainly driven by changes
in the environmental human health indicator while the role of occupational health is minor.
 Implementation of CCS results on a score on impacts on the natural environment that is 70%
lower than the reference scenario. This is mainly due to the significant decrease on the
climate change indicator which counteracts increases shown in other environmental
indicators.
 Implementation of CCS results on a significant increase in the impact on exhaustible
resources, which is due to an increase on fossil depletion. The effect of metal depletion is
negligible compared to the large amount of fossil depletion.
 With a high tax (110 $/tonne Blue map scenario), as used in this study, applying CCS results in
a marked increase in economic activity, when results are analysed at the technology level.
The results also show a substantial increase in working hours per functional unit. However,
the results also indicate that the producer price increase more than 80% when implementing
CCS.
 The results for social well-being indicate that in the scenario with CCS there is an increase in
total employment and knowledge intensive jobs, and a decrease in income and global
inequality. However, increases in child and forced labour are also observed. The qualitative
indicators reveal that issues such as trust in risk information, long term control functions,
stakeholder involvement can become bottlenecks for the deployment of the technology and
need to be carefully addressed as part of project development and implementation
 There is a large difference in order of magnitude in the end-points. This makes the integration
of results troublesome. Until this problem is solved, it is recommended to assess the results
without a formal aggregation methodology.
The evaluation of the Prosuite framework in the case study CCS provided support for the
applicability of the developed methods, but also illustrated remaining shortcomings and challenges.