Lifecycle carbon footprint and cost assessment for coal-to-liquid coupled with carbon capture, storage, and utilization technology in China

Abstract

The coal-to-liquid coupled with carbon capture, utilization, and storage technology has the potential to reduce CO₂ emissions, but its carbon footprint and cost assessment are still insufficient. In this paper, coal mining to oil production is taken as a life cycle to evaluate the carbon footprint and levelized costs of direct-coal-to-liquid and indirect-coal-to-liquid coupled with the carbon capture utilization and storage technology under three scenarios: non capture, process capture, process and public capture throughout the life cycle. The results show that, first, the coupling carbon capture utilization and storage technology can reduce CO₂ footprint by 28%–57% from 5.91 t CO₂/t·oil of direct-coal-to-liquid and 24%–49% from 7.10 t CO₂/t·oil of indirect-coal-to-liquid. Next, the levelized cost of direct-coal-to-liquid is 648–1027 $/t of oil, whereas that of indirect-coal-to-liquid is 653–1065 $/t of oil. When coupled with the carbon capture utilization and storage technology, the levelized cost of direct-coal-to-liquid is 285–1364 $/t of oil, compared to 1101–9793 $/t of oil for indirect-coal-to-liquid. Finally, sensitivity analysis shows that CO₂ transportation distance has the greatest impact on carbon footprint, while coal price and initial investment cost significantly affect the levelized cost of coal-to-liquid.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

coal-to-liquid / carbon capture / utilization and storage (CCUS) / carbon footprint / levelized cost of liquid / lifecycle assessment

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 72174196 and 71874193), Open Fund of State Key Laboratory of Coal Resources and Safe Mining (China University of Mining and Technology) (Grant Nos. SKLCRSM21KFA05 and SKLCRSM22KFA09), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. 2022JCCXNY02).

Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

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