Decarbonisation Technology – August 2021

Segmenting the industry

The industry market can be divided into three main categories for policy approach: the Source, the Transport, and the Storage and utilisation. Segmenting the market helps set the right tone to make favourable policies for each stakeholder in the industry. Also, it relieves the stakeholders of bearing the entire financial burden of building the CCUS process and infrastructures.

Figure 3 Global storage resource assessment (GtCO 2 )

Source: Global CCS Institute

The Source The Source is the emitting production companies, and already emitting companies such as coal-fired power plants were mostly built without CCUS plans. Therefore, they would need to retrofit the installation on existing facilities. Retrofitting CCUS infrastructure may be a substantial economic feat that would require years to complete. The idea is to reduce the financial load and enormous technical responsibility as much as possible. The responsibility of the Source can be streamlined to carbon capture only and to connect to the main carrier, leaving them to focus on producing mostly pure CO 2 and capturing nearly 100% of their emissions. The transport market takes it up from there. responsible for delivering CO 2 to the storage site. Building transboundary and interboundary pipelines to deliver CO 2 to storage or injection sites requires a set of infrastructure and technical processes (see Figure 2 ). Instead of having direct pipelines for each emitting Source to a storage site, a well-structured pipeline system can be in place to deliver CO 2 to the storage site within the network. For the Sources, this eliminates the cost of building pipelines and avoids the overcrowding on The Transport The transport sector is the main carrier

land and underground with CO 2 pipelines, which are considered dangerous to human lives. The Storage and utilisation (see Figure 3) The storage and utilisation market is considered a separate sector. It receives CO 2 for either utilisation or storage. The facility is designed to separate CO 2 for utilisation and store the excess directly to geologic repositories. This framework will serve as a supply chain for the CO 2 utilisation market and ensure the proper storage and monitoring of the storage site location. The site monitoring, verification and post-closure will be handled by the storage site managers. Segmenting the industry this way allows for rapid innovation and execution of CCUS projects. Each stakeholder can focus on developing and funding a smaller part of the entire chain and not be overwhelmed with regulations. Moreover, this allows policymakers to work with smaller groups to tackle issues they face and to develop a precise and adequate policy for the Source, Transport or Storage and utilisation micro industries. Through this segmentation, the confidence of private investors can be boosted, while reducing market uncertainties to a calculated risk level. Damilola Abe abuxberkeley@gmail.com