DOE - Fossil Energy Techline - Issued on:  January 28, 2013

New Set of Computational Tools and Models Expected to Help Enable Rapid Development and Deployment of Carbon Capture Technologies


Washington, D.C. - An eagerly anticipated suite of 21 computational tools and models to help enable rapid development and deployment of new carbon capture technologies is now available from the Carbon Capture Simulation Initiative (CCSI). 
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The toolset developed by CCSI, a public-private partnership led by the Office of Fossil Energy’s (FE) National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL), will help meet an urgent need by industry to take carbon capture concepts from the laboratory to the power plant more quickly, at lower cost and with reduced risk. 

The total cost savings that could be realized by using the CCSI toolset to scale up and widely deploy a carbon capture technology is estimated at approximately $500 million.  The tools are expected to make it easier for U.S. utilities to meet carbon capture requirements if and when they are enacted and can help technology companies doing business in countries where controls are already in place. 

Carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) technologies are considered by many energy experts as an essential option for helping meet aggressive carbon dioxide (CO2) emission-reduction levels while allowing the continued use of coal, the largest source of electric power and an important component of economic growth.   

The current release, available a year ahead of the original release date, includes tools to help identify promising concepts more quickly; reduce the time to design and troubleshoot new systems; and quantify the uncertainty of model predictions; as well as tools with new capabilities, such as creating reduced-order models from reacting multi-phase flow simulations and running thousands of process simulations concurrently for optimization and uncertainty quantification. 

The CCSI toolset works with commercial and open-source software currently in use by industry and includes new, highly versatile software tools developed to fill technology gaps.  In addition to helping with carbon capture technologies, the tools can be used to accelerate technology development for refining, chemicals production and oil and natural gas production.         

CCSI was formed to provide technology developers and plant operators a validated suite models and simulation tools that could dramatically reduce the 20-30 years of time usually required for commercial technology development.  “The CCSI toolset delivers new capabilities for integrating multi-scale modeling, optimization and uncertainty quantification, which will significantly impact the way carbon capture processes are developed,” said NETL’s David Miller, CCSI technical lead.  

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