CO₂ Transport Infrastructure Outlook in the United States

Technical Report · Mon Feb 10 04:00:00 EST 2025

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/2514419· OSTI ID:2514419

Velasco Lozano, Moises ^[1]; Ma, Zhiwei ^[1]; Pawar, Rajesh J. ^[1]; Chen, Bailian ^[1]

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1. Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) represents one of the most important methods to mitigate anthropogenic carbon emissions at a large scale, playing a key role in meeting climate change targets (Bui et al., 2018) and for net-zero CO₂ by 2050 scenarios in the United States (Browning et al., 2023). This technology involves capturing CO₂ emissions from industrial processes, transporting them via pipelines, trucks, rails, or ships, and ultimately storing them in underground geological sites, such as saline aquifers or depleted oil reservoirs. Thus, to encourage carbon reduction initiatives, the U.S. Congress enacted the Bipartisan Budget Act in 2018, reforming the 45Q tax credit to benefit operators storing CO₂ in geologic formations (Jones and Sherlock, 2021). Additionally, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act further expanded these incentives, providing additional support for CCS initiatives (Hackett and Kuehn, 2023). Although numerous studies describe the importance of optimal CO₂ transportation to support the decision-making of CCS projects aligned with the objective of net-zero emissions by 2050 (Abramson and Christensen, 2021; Chen and Pawar, 2023; Greig and Pascale, 2021), further efforts are required to optimize the transport infrastructure for national-scale CCS deployment. Therefore, in this study, we examine three nationwide scenarios with the SimCCS^3.0 tool (Ma et al., 2022, 2023, 2024) along with a novel geospatial splitting approach developed by Velasco-Lozano et al. (Velasco- Lozano et al., 2024a, 2024b). We present optimized pipeline networks that meet the dynamic evolution of annual capture amounts, describing the required total pipeline lengths at each stage as a function of the pipeline diameters. Thus, the cases presented demonstrate the feasibility of CO₂ pipeline infrastructure for large-scale CCS projects.

• Research Organization: Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA); USDOE Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (FECM)
• DOE Contract Number: 89233218CNA000001
• OSTI ID: 2514419
• Report Number(s): LA-UR--25-21315
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES
58 GEOSCIENCES
Earth Sciences