Best practices and recent advances in CCS cost engineering and economic analysis

Cost engineering and economic analysis are key elements of the performance assessment of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. The CCS field has seen noticeable advances in the transparency and rigor of costing studies, but there is still significant room for improvement in three major areas: the more rigorous application of good cost engineering practices; the inclusion (and progression) of recent methodological advances; and adaptation to changing policy focus. Here, we discuss each of these three areas, bringing diverse information sources together into one paper, and summarising important advances made in recent years, with the goal of strengthening CCS cost engineering and economic analysis in general. The first part of the paper discusses equipment design and sizing; cost indices and location factors; process and project contingency costs; CO₂ transport and storage costs; and uncertainty analysis and validation. The second part discusses new insights and advances in capture plant integration costs; the costs of steam supply; flexible dispatch of power plants with CCS; a hybrid method for the costing of advanced CCS technologies; qualitative uncertainty analysis methods; and calculation methods for CO₂ avoidance costs in non-power industries. The third part highlights several recent changes in the policy environments and how they affect the requirements of CCS costing studies. We close the paper by echoing earlier calls for the transparent reporting of assumptions and input variables underlying costing studies and by prioritising three CCS costing issues for further methods and guideline development.