"We need to work collectively as an industry and as a community to address climate change with any technology. We must make technology robust and sustainable for decades to come"
—Chris Powers
VP, Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage, Chevron Corporation at CERAWeek, 2023.

The first session of the Innovation Agora at last month's CERAWeek was a panel on “Advancements in Decarbonizing Heavy Industries” with Jennifer Holmgren, CEO of LanzaTech, Brent Lewis, CEO of Carbon America and Chris Powers, VP, Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage at Chevron Corporation. This conversation was so important that, in my opinion, it set the basis on how asset-intensive industries need to think in terms of sustainability and decarbonization. 

Chris Powers pointed out there are high expectations for certain technologies, but that there is too much risk with relying on a single technology and that we cannot rely on a single way to attack the problem. He said that even while people might want to wait until technology is ready, we need to do more and move fast.  

With the aggressive timelines, Brent Lewis reinforced the idea that we need to scale solutions as fast as we can, and that the priority is to drive down exponentially the cost of technology. And to echo this, Jennifer Holmgren emphasized the importance of leveraging all types of solutions to drive down costs and achieve commercial scale.  

CCUS (Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage) holds great potential to reduce CO2 emissions and support the transition to a hydrogen economy. However, it is necessary to address the key technical and economic challenges across the value chain to move the projects faster.  

In line with this, AspenTech’s unique sets of solutions – sustainability pathways – are structured to drive and accelerate commercialization at large scale. The CCS/CCUS pathway addresses all stages: capture, utilization, transportation and geological storage. 

Enabling companies in this area is not new to AspenTech. During the past decade, companies across the globe have successfully relied on AspenTech offering to drive carbon capture technologies at scale:  

• Econamine FG PlusSM is Fluor’s commercially-proven technology for carbon capture, with 30 licensed plants and 30 years of operating experience. Aspen Plus® has played a central role throughout the development, commercialization, and continued success of this technology. 
• Carbon Engineering evaluated different technology alternatives to develop their 1MT/yr DAC technology using Aspen Plus process simulation capabilities, improving economics of the process, sizing equipment and estimating costs to reduce total capture cost of their capture technology at large scale.  
• Technology Centre Mongstad (TCM), the largest post-combustion CO2 capture (PCC) test center in the world, developed a methodology to support the development of investment strategies, portfolios and evaluation of the commercial project bids for CO2 capture. The work, which was presented at GHGT-16, presents a comprehensive performance and cost estimation baseline using Aspen Plus and Aspen Capital Cost Estimator™ (ACCE) for an amine-based carbon capture process at an industrial-scale NGCC power plant.  

For geological storage, AspenTech Subsurface Science & Engineering solutions can support regulatory frameworks for site deployment and increase a project’s chance of economic success.  

NFR Studies GmbH validated a storage candidate in a depleted oil reservoir using the seismic interpretation and modeling workflow of Aspen SKUA™. The software capabilities enabled a correct representation of a complex fault system for realistic assessment of the sealing capacity and accurate simulation of gas injection scenarios with a fully unstructured reservoir grid aligned along faults and horizons.    

Because there are many stakeholders involved and a wide variety of technologies being utilized in different stages and scopes of CCUS projects, it is clear that there is no one-size-fits-all solution. However, AspenTech solutions are backed by a strong track record, and the CCS/CCUS sustainability pathway provides the necessary tools to tackle the challenges related to cost, risk, and scalability across the entire carbon capture value chain. 

Stay tuned for more information on our other pathways!