skip to main content
OSTI.GOV title logo U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Title: Annual Report: Carbon Capture Simulation Initiative (CCSI) (30 September 2012)

Technical Report ·
DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1098237· OSTI ID:1098237
 [1];  [1];  [2];  [3];  [4];  [5];  [6];  [7];  [8];  [9];  [10];  [4];  [3];  [4];  [9];  [9];  [11]
  1. National Energy Technology Lab. (NETL), Morgantown, WV (United States)
  2. URS Corporation. (URS), San Francisco, CA (United States); National Energy Technology Lab. (NETL), Morgantown, WV (United States)
  3. Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
  4. Pacific Northwest National Lab. (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States)
  5. Princeton Univ., NJ (United States)
  6. Carnegie Mellon Univ., Pittsburgh, PA (United States); National Energy Technology Lab. (NETL), Morgantown, WV (United States)
  7. NETL
  8. West Virginia Univ., Morgantown, WV (United States); National Energy Technology Lab. (NETL), Morgantown, WV (United States)
  9. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
  10. Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)
  11. SynPatEco. Pleasant Hill, CA (United States)

The Carbon Capture Simulation Initiative (CCSI) is a partnership among national laboratories, industry and academic institutions that is developing and deploying state-of-the-art computational modeling and simulation tools to accelerate the commercialization of carbon capture technologies from discovery to development, demonstration, and ultimately the widespread deployment to hundreds of power plants. The CCSI Toolset will provide end users in industry with a comprehensive, integrated suite of scientifically validated models, with uncertainty quantification (UQ), optimization, risk analysis and decision making capabilities. The CCSI Toolset incorporates commercial and open-source software currently in use by industry and is also developing new software tools as necessary to fill technology gaps identified during execution of the project. Ultimately, the CCSI Toolset will (1) enable promising concepts to be more quickly identified through rapid computational screening of devices and processes; (2) reduce the time to design and troubleshoot new devices and processes; (3) quantify the technical risk in taking technology from laboratory-scale to commercial-scale; and (4) stabilize deployment costs more quickly by replacing some of the physical operational tests with virtual power plant simulations. CCSI is organized into 8 technical elements that fall under two focus areas. The first focus area (Physicochemical Models and Data) addresses the steps necessary to model and simulate the various technologies and processes needed to bring a new Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technology into production. The second focus area (Analysis & Software) is developing the software infrastructure to integrate the various components and implement the tools that are needed to make quantifiable decisions regarding the viability of new CCS technologies. CCSI also has an Industry Advisory Board (IAB). By working closely with industry from the inception of the project to identify industrial challenge problems, CCSI ensures that the simulation tools are developed for the carbon capture technologies of most relevance to industry. CCSI is led by the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) and leverages the Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratories' core strengths in modeling and simulation, bringing together the best capabilities at NETL, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). The CCSI's industrial partners provide representation from the power generation industry, equipment manufacturers, technology providers and engineering and construction firms. The CCSI's academic participants (Carnegie Mellon University, Princeton University, West Virginia University, and Boston University) bring unparalleled expertise in multiphase flow reactors, combustion, process synthesis and optimization, planning and scheduling, and process control techniques for energy processes. During Fiscal Year (FY) 12, CCSI released its first set of computational tools and models. This pre-release, a year ahead of the originally planned first release, is the result of intense industry interest in getting early access to the tools and the phenomenal progress of the CCSI technical team. These initial components of the CCSI Toolset provide new models and computational capabilities that will accelerate the commercial development of carbon capture technologies as well as related technologies, such as those found in the power, refining, chemicals, and gas production industries. The release consists of new tools for process synthesis and optimization to help identify promising concepts more quickly, new physics-based models of potential capture equipment and processes that will reduce the time to design and troubleshoot new systems, a framework to quantify the uncertainty of model predictions, and various enabling tools that provide new capabilities such as creating reduced order models (ROMs) from reacting multiphase flow simulations and running thousands of process simulations concurrently for optimization and UQ.

Research Organization:
National Energy Technology Lab. (NETL), Pittsburgh, PA, and Morgantown, WV (United States). In-house Research
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Fossil Energy (FE)
OSTI ID:
1098237
Report Number(s):
NETL-PUB-820
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English