Preliminary assessment of CO2 transport and storage costs of promising source-sink matching scenarios in Guangdong province, China

Guangdong is the most economically developed province in China, which is a large CO2 emitter and hence is faced with severe carbon reduction pressures. In this paper, a cost assessment methodology based on scenario analysis is presented. A CO2 source and sink database was built at Guangdong after detailed investigations on the point sources and sedimentary basins. Fifteen transport and five storage scenarios were defined and studied, respectively. Cost estimates based on these scenarios show that during its lifetime, the costs of both transport and storage depend on the amount of CO2 processed. More CO2 being processed will bring down the unit costs of both transport and storage. However, it was observed that there is a cost inflection point between the storage amount of 35.2 and 52.8 Mt/year, which means that as the storage amount increases, the storage cost will first decrease and then increase. Source region S1 in Guangdong has been recommended for an early chance of CO2 storage. Preliminary cost comparisons have shown that the results presented in this study are reasonable, but to improve the cost assessment accuracy of offshore CO2 storage, a methodology based on a CO2 storage design that can integrate local prices needs to be further developed.